I don't wanna go to the stars. I don't even want to go to Mars. And I sure as hell don't want a $50,000 car that takes half an hour to fuel and I can't refuel from a gas can in an emergency.
I suppose I'm just gonna be left behind.
Is there anything I can do to expedite the departure of the rest of you?
I think that's true of every car from major manufacturers. I assume that's why you sometimes need information like VIN number when ordering replacement parts.
I once owned a Mazda GLC that had every emissions control known to man. The emissions setup didn't match the shop manual, or the emissions sticker under the hood. I assume that it was built when they were in the process of switching from one configuration to another and I ended up with parts for both. Unfortunately, I only discovered all that AFTER I had disconnected all the hardware in order to replace a head gasket and was starting to reassemble the thing.
Not so. There are several places in Vermont where if you stand in the right spot and hold your phone just so, you can sometimes get one or even two bars on your cell phone.
Seriously, cell phone coverage in Vermont used to be pretty bad to nonexistent. But for the past decade or so, it's been much improved. Heck, in some places you can even get a signal indoors these days.
Telegraphs and telephones largely do different things. Roughly, telephony is voice. Telegraphy is text. The two existed in parallel for about a century. What killed telegraphy wasn't telephony. It was satellite communications,the Internet, and the widespread availability of PCs and modems that allowed cheap, reliable, digital communications via the telephone voice network.
Just in case anyone would like some actual data, NOAA has data for a great many tide gauges accessible on the internet. Here's a l;ink to the chart of roughly 150 years worth of data for the gauge at the battery in New York City. https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.... They've even done a linear fit to the data -- 11 inches a century. About 25% of apparent Sea Level Rise at The Battery is thought to be due to the site sinking a few inches a century. The rest is actual SLR.
Anyway, feel free to examine the data. See if you can eyeball any post 1950 acceleration in sea level rise (I can't. I doubt even a Slashdot editor can). You may want to check other NOAA gauges to confirm that The Battery isn't some sort of weird anomaly. For sites elsewhere on the planet, try the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level.http://www.psmsl.org (You may have to do your own data fit).
My conclusion. Engineers in New York City and Seattle probably aren't building unprotected critical communication infrastructure 3 or 6 or even 12 inches above high water. MIami? Who the hell knows? We're talking Florida here. Recommended reading: Anything by Carl Hiaasen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Really? My experience is that Amazon shows me stuff that I looked at six weeks ago, but didn't buy. That sort of make sense... As much as anything on the modern Internet makes sense. Maybe I forgot about it, but still am interested?... Could happen I suppose... Maybe once or even twice a decade.
"I wonder why they would show you ads for something you've already bought..."
Have you ever talked to an advertising person? Their "thought" process appears to be a mixture of Lewis Carroll, Ayn Rand, and Franz Kafka. I don't think that expecting it to make sense is likely to produce much in the way of results.
Or you can use the the hosts file available at http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/ho... It's a little bulky at 470K bytes or so, and I haven't the slightest idea where Windows hides the hosts file nowadays (Unixen put it where they always have at/etc/hosts) But it certainly does work for linux.
If and when web advertisers clean up their act and quit trying to play games with me and MY computer, I'll be more than happy to remove my hosts file and display their ads (if they will kindly serve them promptly and keep the number and bandwidth within reason. And as long as they don't even think about including audio)..However, I imagine that in practice, I'll simply skip past their ads just like I do with magazine and newspaper ads.
"Google is going to pull the plug and hold a decade's worth of work hostage to subscription fees, but they think I'm just a raving lunatic."
Without warning? Of course not. Google will give them several weeks warning before imposing fees -- Just enough time for them to figure out that they are stuck in a cloudy trap and that it's easier and cheaper to pay Google a tithe every month than to move to an alternative solution.
"They [the homeless] can live inside the abandoned wind towers"
One of the few --- maybe the only -- good thing(s) about being homeless is that you don't have to live in Phoenix in the Summer or North Dakota in the Winter or West Texas any time of the year. Sometimes free housing is too expensive.
On second thought, a quantum radar working by observing the entangled photon retained at the radar tranmitter, could conceptually provide detection of stealth platforms that become stealthy by absorbing incoming photons and/or deflecting incoming signals off toward anywhere other than the radar's antenna.
I'm real shaky on quantum entanglement, but I think this would work by sending one entangled photon off never to be seen again and determining presence of an object and its distance from the time delay between firing the photon off and its mate changing state. Can that work in concept? Yes, I think probably it can.
Can it work in practice using today's technology. I doubt it.
Does it offer any advantage over conventional radar? Maybe, but my initial impression is that it is probably a complicated way to do what can be done without quantum entanglement. The one thing it would do is defeat jamming from transmitters operating on the radar's frequency. But I think such jamming is very hard to do (because radar signals can be 'chirped' and the jammer has to mimic the chirp pattern). Also such jamming is probably not healthy for the jammer which could presumably be passively tracked and attacked using its own transmissions.
I haven't worked around radar/ABM stuff for decades. Any input from those with more recent experience?
Please. Our neighborhood rodentia have asked me to point out that they are hardworking creatures just trying to eek out a living in a harsh world. They assert that Trump is not one of theirs. For one thing, he's far too large and noisy, and for another, no rat colony would tolerate a member that obnoxious and deceitful. They have asked me to inform you that if you continue to associate them with the president, you will be hearing from their lawyers.
Corals are in fact animals. But they keep dinoflagellate symbionts that are plants. The exact relationship between the coral animals and the zooantha is a bit unclear, but the relationship is apparently beneficial to both.
You questioning science, citizen? Shut up and do your part to save the planet.
Maybe you can use the charging point in your apartment (as we call them here in North America) to make toast in seconds rather than minutes.
It might make more sense to require chargers in parking lots. If you charge vehicles where they are likely to be in the daytime, you can use solar power as well as wind. Of course, if you put the chargers in parking lots, the (probably quite high) costs become more visible.
I can't think why there would be ANY gold in consumer electronics these days. Gold was widely used in electronics connectors prior to the 1970s because it's a very good conductor, and it doesn't oxidize. But when Gold prices soared from $32 an Oz(28g) to (briefly) $800/Ounce (28g) and settled around $400/Oz, Gold was eliminated where possible and was reduced to VERY thin coatings elsewhere. But it turned out that very thin coatings aren't very compatible with gas-tight connector technology (the GT sockets tended to tear the gold off anything with gold platings inserted in them).
There is a fair amount of Copper ($3/lb-$6/kg) and Lead ($1/lb-$2/kg) in old electronics, but you're going to end up with huge amounts of waste glass and plastic if you go after it.
I'd like this article to be true of course. But I think it's probably just the usual envirodrivel mined by child labor and pathetic, sad-eyed, abandoned household pets in some third world country and dealt on street corners by shady characters to Slashdot editors and other well intentioned, but weak minded folk.
It seems to me like an oilfield services company like Halliburton or Schlumberger -- folks with decades of experience drilling holes -- might have more to offer. But what the hell, once you get past the narcissism and apparently somewhat casual attitude toward the truth, Musk isn't stupid and his projects generally seem reasonably well planned and not prima facia crazed. And unlike some other narcissistic sociopaths one might mention, Musk actually does have some knowledge of technologies that might be useful.
Have you tried buying an unsmart TV in the US recently? Moreover, even if you have a home router and have access and know how to set up its routing tables, how do you know what IP address(es) your new 56 inch Spycoware TV is using? And if it's streaming, material you can't just block the miserable thing no matter how appealing the idea. I suspect the same is true in the rest of the world as well.
My question is who is actually paying for the vast amount of almost certainly worthless data they are collecting, and why? Is there any chance they will quit paying and eventually cause this nonsense to fade away?
Sadly, you are all too right. And we've thanked the Brits by sending them F35s -- the 21st Century equivalent of laying a white elephant or two on them.
I agree that flying across the Pacific is very tedious. Hated it myself. But consider that the heavily traveled route from West Coast North America to East Asia is (or can be) almost entirely over water and could be flown at supersonic speeds with a short subsonic segment at each end. That's what Concorde did across the North Atlantic My understanding is that It isn't done that way because its really hard to design an aircraft that can carry enough fuel to travel 10000km at supersonic speeds and also carry passengers and freight. The SR-71 Blackbird -- basically a huge titanium can with two engines and a LOT of fuel -- required in-air refueling to make long distance flights. The Wikipedia article on the SR-71 highlights a lot of other design issues with the real supersonic aircraft one might like to have when faced with a 20 hour flight from Los Angeles to Singapore or Mumbai. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Slashdot Mirror
Presumably it not only has Reverse, but also four wheel steering. Doable I should think. ... But not everything that is doable makes sense to do.
"Tesla were designed and built more like a software development project, then a traditional automobile project,"
And you think that is positive?
Keep in mind that automobile makers, unlike software developers, can be held liable for (some) design defects.
"This tent based production methodology is the future!"
Does that mean that Musk is going to go into business making and selling tents?
But ... But ... But ...
I don't wanna go to the stars. I don't even want to go to Mars. And I sure as hell don't want a $50,000 car that takes half an hour to fuel and I can't refuel from a gas can in an emergency.
I suppose I'm just gonna be left behind.
Is there anything I can do to expedite the departure of the rest of you?
I think that's true of every car from major manufacturers. I assume that's why you sometimes need information like VIN number when ordering replacement parts.
I once owned a Mazda GLC that had every emissions control known to man. The emissions setup didn't match the shop manual, or the emissions sticker under the hood. I assume that it was built when they were in the process of switching from one configuration to another and I ended up with parts for both. Unfortunately, I only discovered all that AFTER I had disconnected all the hardware in order to replace a head gasket and was starting to reassemble the thing.
"Well, in Vermont they don't work at all "
Not so. There are several places in Vermont where if you stand in the right spot and hold your phone just so, you can sometimes get one or even two bars on your cell phone.
Seriously, cell phone coverage in Vermont used to be pretty bad to nonexistent. But for the past decade or so, it's been much improved. Heck, in some places you can even get a signal indoors these days.
Cell phones work in New Hampshire? Who knew?
Telegraphs and telephones largely do different things. Roughly, telephony is voice. Telegraphy is text. The two existed in parallel for about a century. What killed telegraphy wasn't telephony. It was satellite communications,the Internet, and the widespread availability of PCs and modems that allowed cheap, reliable, digital communications via the telephone voice network.
Just in case anyone would like some actual data, NOAA has data for a great many tide gauges accessible on the internet. Here's a l;ink to the chart of roughly 150 years worth of data for the gauge at the battery in New York City. https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.... They've even done a linear fit to the data -- 11 inches a century. About 25% of apparent Sea Level Rise at The Battery is thought to be due to the site sinking a few inches a century. The rest is actual SLR.
Anyway, feel free to examine the data. See if you can eyeball any post 1950 acceleration in sea level rise (I can't. I doubt even a Slashdot editor can). You may want to check other NOAA gauges to confirm that The Battery isn't some sort of weird anomaly. For sites elsewhere on the planet, try the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level.http://www.psmsl.org (You may have to do your own data fit).
My conclusion. Engineers in New York City and Seattle probably aren't building unprotected critical communication infrastructure 3 or 6 or even 12 inches above high water. MIami? Who the hell knows? We're talking Florida here. Recommended reading: Anything by Carl Hiaasen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Really? My experience is that Amazon shows me stuff that I looked at six weeks ago, but didn't buy. That sort of make sense ... As much as anything on the modern Internet makes sense. Maybe I forgot about it, but still am interested? ... Could happen I suppose ... Maybe once or even twice a decade.
"I wonder why they would show you ads for something you've already bought..."
Have you ever talked to an advertising person? Their "thought" process appears to be a mixture of Lewis Carroll, Ayn Rand, and Franz Kafka. I don't think that expecting it to make sense is likely to produce much in the way of results.
Or you can use the the hosts file available at http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/ho... It's a little bulky at 470K bytes or so, and I haven't the slightest idea where Windows hides the hosts file nowadays (Unixen put it where they always have at /etc/hosts) But it certainly does work for linux.
If and when web advertisers clean up their act and quit trying to play games with me and MY computer, I'll be more than happy to remove my hosts file and display their ads (if they will kindly serve them promptly and keep the number and bandwidth within reason. And as long as they don't even think about including audio). .However, I imagine that in practice, I'll simply skip past their ads just like I do with magazine and newspaper ads.
"Google is going to pull the plug and hold a decade's worth of work hostage to subscription fees, but they think I'm just a raving lunatic."
Without warning? Of course not. Google will give them several weeks warning before imposing fees -- Just enough time for them to figure out that they are stuck in a cloudy trap and that it's easier and cheaper to pay Google a tithe every month than to move to an alternative solution.
"They [the homeless] can live inside the abandoned wind towers"
One of the few --- maybe the only -- good thing(s) about being homeless is that you don't have to live in Phoenix in the Summer or North Dakota in the Winter or West Texas any time of the year. Sometimes free housing is too expensive.
On second thought, a quantum radar working by observing the entangled photon retained at the radar tranmitter, could conceptually provide detection of stealth platforms that become stealthy by absorbing incoming photons and/or deflecting incoming signals off toward anywhere other than the radar's antenna.
I'm real shaky on quantum entanglement, but I think this would work by sending one entangled photon off never to be seen again and determining presence of an object and its distance from the time delay between firing the photon off and its mate changing state. Can that work in concept? Yes, I think probably it can.
Can it work in practice using today's technology. I doubt it.
Does it offer any advantage over conventional radar? Maybe, but my initial impression is that it is probably a complicated way to do what can be done without quantum entanglement. The one thing it would do is defeat jamming from transmitters operating on the radar's frequency. But I think such jamming is very hard to do (because radar signals can be 'chirped' and the jammer has to mimic the chirp pattern). Also such jamming is probably not healthy for the jammer which could presumably be passively tracked and attacked using its own transmissions.
I haven't worked around radar/ABM stuff for decades. Any input from those with more recent experience?
"Trump of course is King Rat."
Please. Our neighborhood rodentia have asked me to point out that they are hardworking creatures just trying to eek out a living in a harsh world. They assert that Trump is not one of theirs. For one thing, he's far too large and noisy, and for another, no rat colony would tolerate a member that obnoxious and deceitful. They have asked me to inform you that if you continue to associate them with the president, you will be hearing from their lawyers.
Corals are in fact animals. But they keep dinoflagellate symbionts that are plants. The exact relationship between the coral animals and the zooantha is a bit unclear, but the relationship is apparently beneficial to both.
You questioning science, citizen? Shut up and do your part to save the planet.
Maybe you can use the charging point in your apartment (as we call them here in North America) to make toast in seconds rather than minutes.
It might make more sense to require chargers in parking lots. If you charge vehicles where they are likely to be in the daytime, you can use solar power as well as wind. Of course, if you put the chargers in parking lots, the (probably quite high) costs become more visible.
I can't think why there would be ANY gold in consumer electronics these days. Gold was widely used in electronics connectors prior to the 1970s because it's a very good conductor, and it doesn't oxidize. But when Gold prices soared from $32 an Oz(28g) to (briefly) $800/Ounce (28g) and settled around $400 /Oz, Gold was eliminated where possible and was reduced to VERY thin coatings elsewhere. But it turned out that very thin coatings aren't very compatible with gas-tight connector technology (the GT sockets tended to tear the gold off anything with gold platings inserted in them).
There is a fair amount of Copper ($3/lb-$6/kg) and Lead ($1/lb-$2/kg) in old electronics, but you're going to end up with huge amounts of waste glass and plastic if you go after it.
I'd like this article to be true of course. But I think it's probably just the usual envirodrivel mined by child labor and pathetic, sad-eyed, abandoned household pets in some third world country and dealt on street corners by shady characters to Slashdot editors and other well intentioned, but weak minded folk.
It seems to me like an oilfield services company like Halliburton or Schlumberger -- folks with decades of experience drilling holes -- might have more to offer. But what the hell, once you get past the narcissism and apparently somewhat casual attitude toward the truth, Musk isn't stupid and his projects generally seem reasonably well planned and not prima facia crazed. And unlike some other narcissistic sociopaths one might mention, Musk actually does have some knowledge of technologies that might be useful.
Have you tried buying an unsmart TV in the US recently? Moreover, even if you have a home router and have access and know how to set up its routing tables, how do you know what IP address(es) your new 56 inch Spycoware TV is using? And if it's streaming, material you can't just block the miserable thing no matter how appealing the idea. I suspect the same is true in the rest of the world as well.
My question is who is actually paying for the vast amount of almost certainly worthless data they are collecting, and why? Is there any chance they will quit paying and eventually cause this nonsense to fade away?
Sadly, you are all too right. And we've thanked the Brits by sending them F35s -- the 21st Century equivalent of laying a white elephant or two on them.
I agree that flying across the Pacific is very tedious. Hated it myself. But consider that the heavily traveled route from West Coast North America to East Asia is (or can be) almost entirely over water and could be flown at supersonic speeds with a short subsonic segment at each end. That's what Concorde did across the North Atlantic My understanding is that It isn't done that way because its really hard to design an aircraft that can carry enough fuel to travel 10000km at supersonic speeds and also carry passengers and freight. The SR-71 Blackbird -- basically a huge titanium can with two engines and a LOT of fuel -- required in-air refueling to make long distance flights. The Wikipedia article on the SR-71 highlights a lot of other design issues with the real supersonic aircraft one might like to have when faced with a 20 hour flight from Los Angeles to Singapore or Mumbai. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"it's probably easy to change the data on it in case you want to be incognito"
So, you rob a bank, drive away quickly, press a button, your license plate tries to call home. And your license plater number changes to ERROR404.