To put it it more simply, if you send a faster than light message, which thing happened first (you sending or the recipient receiving of the message) will be different depending on your the frame of reference. For some observers, the recipient will appear to receive the message before you send it.
If it takes time for light to travel from point "A" to Point "B". How can the signal ever arrive before it was sent? It takes ~4 years for light to get from Proxima Centrauri to Earth. If I send a signal at 2x the speed of light, it should take ~2 years to get there. At 4x it should take ~1 year. Wouldn't that imply that even at an infinite times the speed of light, the signal should still arrive a fraction of a second after you sent it? Or am I missing something?
Then there's the cost of getting services to your chosen site. It costs a bit to get electricity, water, and sewerage to a building site, or to provide a drilled well and septic system in a site that's too remote for municipal services. And then there's the cost of preparing the site for the structure. In much of the world the foundation would need to be much more robust (possibly with drainage, insulation, etc.) than the bare-bones arrangement presented.
This is not to denigrate the concept of an inexpensive functional structure, which is good, but to point out that the cost of making a habitable house involves more than the headline cost of the structure itself.
Instead of doing one house, what if a developer were to build a subdivision of these houses. The infrastructure (electricity, water, sewer, phone, cable) should be a lot cheaper per house. I bet you could sell these for at least $20-30k and make a tidy profit. Depending on the subdivision amenities, and who you market it to, you could probably get more.
...and Borders failed to adapt to a changed world. Why didn't Borders open up an online store? Why didn't Borders look into eBooks/eReaders the way Barnes & Noble did?
Borders does have an online store (http://www.borders.com) and it does have an ebook reader (Kobo). As far as I know, it is only closing its brick & mortar stores.
At our technological level, we pose no danger to anything off this planet.
It would be like saying you'll sterilize a grain of sand to protect the planet.
Such a silly scenario...
If we ever develop interstellar travel that is fast, cheap and practical, maybe then this scenario starts to have legs.
I think that it is a plausible scenario. What would you do if you are an advanced alien race, that sees what we are doing to our own planet and you have no reason to believe that we would do any less through out the galaxy? Would you wait until we were advanced enough to do some real damage or would you step in now and deal with the problem while we are confined to this one planet.
Yes, the solution is extreme but it is not unprecedented. Through out history, there are many examples of a group of people committing genocide against another group of people for all different reasons. So why is it hard to believe that an alien race that has nothing in common with us would try to exterminate us before we got the chance to screw up the rest of the galaxy.
How much of the voice network goes across the internet now?
How many companies most if not all their business on the internet?
How much do the airlines depend on the internet? The ticketing counters have terminals that access some database housed in some data center. If you are traveling you could be stuck where ever you are at. Hell, how is all the flight information shared between the airports? I doubt that the FAA has a separate isolated network.
How much of the trading on the stock markets are done on the internet?
Go to the store and try to buy something with a credit or debit card. Your cards are verified across the internet.
Go to the bank and try to get your money out. Does the local branch of your bank have your account information? Or is that information stored in some data center that is accessed via the internet?
I could go on and on with examples. It is amazing how within the past 10 years the internet has become such an integral part of our daily lives. Just the other day, I tried to explain to my daughter that when I was growing up, most people had not even heard of the internet and you were lucking if your school had a computer. She just could not understand how we did things with out computers and access to the internet.
I would be interested in hearing from an economist on what the economic impact(both US & Global) would be if the internet was shut down for a day, a week, a month, etc.
Most of the people that are renting the movie are those that did not want to pay the $30-$40 to see it in the theater and were willing to wait to rent it. So what makes them think that these same people will spend $20-$30 for the movie instead of waiting an extra 30 days. They have already waited atleast a couple months, what is 30 days more?
This guy is expect to be on call 24/7/365... No thanks.
I have worked a couple jobs that I was on call 24/7/365. I did not get paid for being on call. It was automatically a minimum of 2 hrs that i did not have to work during normal hrs. The best calls were the ones that I got after I had been drinking for a few hours. It is amazing how long things take to get fixed when you are drunk. If I had to go into the office, the clock ran from the time that I got the call to the time that I got back home. It always made for short weeks. Almost every Friday we would go to lunch at a pub and not go back to work.
Have you considered making their system into a VM host?
This is exactly what I did with my son. I installed vmplayer, created a VM and locked everything down so that the only internet access that he has is via the VM. The one difference from the parent is that I do not back up and restore any files, that is his problem. When he screws up the current VM, I just remove it and drop in a copy of the original VM. I am done within a half hour. You should have seen my son's face the first time that he screwed up the VM. He could not believe that I just blew away the VM with all his data on it. He learned very quickly after that to keep backups of everything that he wants to keep.
Basically, that is the way that I see it. There is no other way for them to tell if I watched the commercials.
If they really wanted accurate data they would pay you to wear an RFID tag so they could tell if you were even in the room while things are playing, and install software on your DVR to tell them exactly what was on the screen.
When my wife signed us up, I really assumed that they would have some type of electronic device that would track everything or they would have a way to pull the info from the DVRs.
If they really wanted to be accurate, they would get together with the different providers of the DVRs, Cable boxes, Sat receivers, etc and add the ability to log all the needed data. You would have to also build in the capability for the user to shut off the logging so that people will not complain about their privacy being invaded. You could then upload the logs on a nightly basis from all the users that allow it and compile it. There is so many ways that you could slice the data. There is enough people that would be willing to do this that you would get pretty accurate numbers. You would also get the numbers year round instead of the one week a year as it is in the current system.
I bet that there are ways to tag the individual commercials so that they can track which commercials are actually being watched. They could compile this data and sell it to the add companies so that they have better data on what catches peoples attention. I also notice that a lot of times, I will watch the first commercial before I remember that I can fast forward. I usually also catch the end of the last commercial. They could sell this info to the TV stations which could use that data to justify charging more for the first and last commercials in a break.
I'm curious as to how these statistics were collected. Do the Nielsen people have technology installed in the DVRs now? I'd be surprised if our DVRs aren't being data-mined yet.
I actually one of the Nielsen families this year, my wife signed us up and we were selected. I was actually surprised that it was very low tech. You are given a booklet for each TV in your house. You have to hand write in the information. There is a column to fill out if you watch something that was DVR'd. I used that column for almost everything I watched. Since each row is a 15 minute time block, if you took more then 45 minutes to watch an hour long show, you would have either have to shorten the time to 45 minutes or say that it took 60 minutes to watch the show. I assume that if you lengthened it to 60, they said you watched the adds. On 30 minute shows, most people probable did what I did and just marked down that it took 30 minutes. Every couple shows, I would have a 15 minute show so that the time would match up again. on top of all that, there is no way to track the number of times that I paused the shows, to do something else (get a drink, eat, use the bathroom, take care of the kids, etc) So, I would not trust any of the data about commercials at all.
the warrant is against the company holding the email, not against you.
The warrant might be presented to the ISP, but it is for a specific persons email.
The Article compares it essentially to when the government seizes property that is in the possession of a third party, it only has to notify the third party, not the property owner. I am not a lawyer and don't play at being one. But, outside of internet related cases, have you ever heard of a warrant being issued to person "A" that states is does not want person "A's" property, just the property that person "A" is holding for person "B".
A good example would be: Has there ever been a warrant issued directly to the USPS/UPS/FedEx for all mail/packages sent to/from Person "B" that did not require that person "B" be notified of the warrent?
but something with 7000 batteries that cost $100k and can only hold two people is just not viable transportation. Nice toy-not a real vehicle.
Which of the three make it not not viable transportation or a real vehicle? The fact that it has 7000 batteries should not factor in at all. Would you feel better if it was just one big battery of equivalent size? As for the $100k and 2 person point, most sports cars over $100k are only 2 person cars. So, are they also not real vehicles. For you they might not be feasible but for someone that does not have kids, has a relatively short commute, and can afford it, it is viable transportation and I bet a lot of fun.
When most new technologies are released, they are usually priced where the average person can not afford it. But over time either the price will come down or newer cheaper versions are build. Look at the cost of the first Plasma TVs that came out, they were around $10k to $15K. Enough people bought them at that price that the price started dropping and other vendors started producing cheaper and better quality TVs. The same happened with PCs, Gaming consoles, DVD players, Blue-Ray, and the list goes on. The same thing will happen here. Tesla is already working on a new model (http://www.teslamotors.com/models/index.php) that is cheaper ($50K), has better range and can hold more than 2 people.
Even better if you can follow it up within the next few days with "do you see that woman? Her tummy is big because a baby is growing inside".
("How did the baby get inside mummy's tummy?" "Daddy put it there.")
That's all well and good until your child goes up to that lady and says that "my daddy says that you are going to have a baby", and it turns out that she is not really pregnant.
but what I recall of it was the idea that, as the Solar system passes through the galactic plane, we're inundated with far more dust than while outside it.
I admit that I am not an astronomy expert, but I thought that we travelled around the center of the galaxy in the galactic plane and that we pass thru the spiral arms. It is the spiral arms that have the large concentrations of stars and dust.
if you look closely at the article, this is something that the air force did between 2005-2007. so this is actually old news.
'The Air Force began the project in 2005 and finished installing the new configuration on systems in 2007. In contracts with hardware providers it demanded that vendors pre-load the special Windows XP configuration onto systems before delivering them to the Air Force.'
As far as the uncensored site attracting more discussion, that can only be judged conclusively if the number of posts deleted on the moderated site is known - although they would have to outnumber existing posts by a factor of 5.5 for the sites to have had equivalent levels of traffic. That would not work either. You can not calculate the number of responses that would have been generated if the messages were not deleted.
The Zero Gravity Corporation (http://www.gozerog.com/) alone has had over 4000 passengers on their vomit comets. I know that it is not sub orbital or orbital flight. But it does show that people will pay even if they are not the first. After the first person dished out $10-20 million to take a ride on the Soyuz spacecraft and visit the ISS, it hasn't stopped other people from doing the same. Also, Virgin Galactic (http://www.virgingalactic.com/), who does not even have the plane built yet, is already taking reservations. This is just three examples that I know of. If I were to do any research, I bet I could find a bunch more example.
I was just looking into these the other day. If you want to spend the money, They have SSDs that erase to Military SPECs (http://www.stec-inc.com/technology/total_drive_protection.php). If you are really paranoid, they even have a destructive purge that will destroy the drive in 2 seconds.
I usually do the same thing but something I go a little further. I will not only fast forward through the annoying commercials but when I have recorded a baseball game I usually start getting annoyed with the announcers and I will start fast forwarded between pitches so that I do not have to listen to the them.
If my daughter was one of the kids in that school, I would be beating the $#!T out the those teachers. While I was doing it, I would keep telling them that THIS IS NOT A DRILL!
A better way to phrase your question would be to ask "How soon before we see the supernova?" And the answer is that no one knows the exact time. It could happen tomorrow, next year, or hundreds to thousands of years from now. There is no way to get that precise. To guess to within 1000 years would be similar to observing a 99 year old person for a couple minutes. Compare what we observed to what we know from observing other people of similar age. Then calculate, to within a day, when that person will die.
4. Participant agrees not to do the following, except with the advanced review and written approval of Google: (a) issue or release any articles, advertising, publicity, or other matter relating to this Agreement (including the fact that a meeting or discussion has taken place between the parties) or mentioning or implying the name of Google."
"Yes, I used to work for an internet search engine company, but I can't tell you which one."
Section 4 also states that you can not imply the name Google. Wouldn't your statement fall under that?
Definitely not a cheap solution. Not only do you have to take into consideration the cost of hardware, but the time that your sys admin & whomever else that needs to be involved, will need to spend recovering the backup and then validating the recovery. It just comes down to is it worth the extra cost. If I am backing up the core of my business like databases that house my financial & customer info, or a system that has the only copy of the next issue of my magazine, then I would spend the money to have a system that I can use to test the recovery of my backups. If my systems are not critical to the success of my business and I really don't have the extra money to spend, then I would take the chance that I can recover my data.
It is also a very good practice to test the recovery of the backups on a regular basis. Just because the logs say that the backups ran successfully does not necessarily mean that the restore will work.
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To put it it more simply, if you send a faster than light message, which thing happened first (you sending or the recipient receiving of the message) will be different depending on your the frame of reference. For some observers, the recipient will appear to receive the message before you send it.
If it takes time for light to travel from point "A" to Point "B". How can the signal ever arrive before it was sent? It takes ~4 years for light to get from Proxima Centrauri to Earth. If I send a signal at 2x the speed of light, it should take ~2 years to get there. At 4x it should take ~1 year. Wouldn't that imply that even at an infinite times the speed of light, the signal should still arrive a fraction of a second after you sent it? Or am I missing something?
Then there's the cost of getting services to your chosen site. It costs a bit to get electricity, water, and sewerage to a building site, or to provide a drilled well and septic system in a site that's too remote for municipal services. And then there's the cost of preparing the site for the structure. In much of the world the foundation would need to be much more robust (possibly with drainage, insulation, etc.) than the bare-bones arrangement presented.
This is not to denigrate the concept of an inexpensive functional structure, which is good, but to point out that the cost of making a habitable house involves more than the headline cost of the structure itself.
Instead of doing one house, what if a developer were to build a subdivision of these houses. The infrastructure (electricity, water, sewer, phone, cable) should be a lot cheaper per house. I bet you could sell these for at least $20-30k and make a tidy profit. Depending on the subdivision amenities, and who you market it to, you could probably get more.
Borders does have an online store (http://www.borders.com) and it does have an ebook reader (Kobo). As far as I know, it is only closing its brick & mortar stores.
At our technological level, we pose no danger to anything off this planet.
It would be like saying you'll sterilize a grain of sand to protect the planet.
Such a silly scenario...
If we ever develop interstellar travel that is fast, cheap and practical, maybe then this scenario starts to have legs.
I think that it is a plausible scenario. What would you do if you are an advanced alien race, that sees what we are doing to our own planet and you have no reason to believe that we would do any less through out the galaxy? Would you wait until we were advanced enough to do some real damage or would you step in now and deal with the problem while we are confined to this one planet.
Yes, the solution is extreme but it is not unprecedented. Through out history, there are many examples of a group of people committing genocide against another group of people for all different reasons. So why is it hard to believe that an alien race that has nothing in common with us would try to exterminate us before we got the chance to screw up the rest of the galaxy.
How much of the voice network goes across the internet now?
How many companies most if not all their business on the internet?
How much do the airlines depend on the internet? The ticketing counters have terminals that access some database housed in some data center. If you are traveling you could be stuck where ever you are at. Hell, how is all the flight information shared between the airports? I doubt that the FAA has a separate isolated network.
How much of the trading on the stock markets are done on the internet?
Go to the store and try to buy something with a credit or debit card. Your cards are verified across the internet.
Go to the bank and try to get your money out. Does the local branch of your bank have your account information? Or is that information stored in some data center that is accessed via the internet?
I could go on and on with examples. It is amazing how within the past 10 years the internet has become such an integral part of our daily lives. Just the other day, I tried to explain to my daughter that when I was growing up, most people had not even heard of the internet and you were lucking if your school had a computer. She just could not understand how we did things with out computers and access to the internet.
I would be interested in hearing from an economist on what the economic impact(both US & Global) would be if the internet was shut down for a day, a week, a month, etc.
Most of the people that are renting the movie are those that did not want to pay the $30-$40 to see it in the theater and were willing to wait to rent it. So what makes them think that these same people will spend $20-$30 for the movie instead of waiting an extra 30 days. They have already waited atleast a couple months, what is 30 days more?
This guy is expect to be on call 24/7/365... No thanks.
I have worked a couple jobs that I was on call 24/7/365. I did not get paid for being on call. It was automatically a minimum of 2 hrs that i did not have to work during normal hrs. The best calls were the ones that I got after I had been drinking for a few hours. It is amazing how long things take to get fixed when you are drunk. If I had to go into the office, the clock ran from the time that I got the call to the time that I got back home. It always made for short weeks. Almost every Friday we would go to lunch at a pub and not go back to work.
Have you considered making their system into a VM host?
This is exactly what I did with my son. I installed vmplayer, created a VM and locked everything down so that the only internet access that he has is via the VM. The one difference from the parent is that I do not back up and restore any files, that is his problem. When he screws up the current VM, I just remove it and drop in a copy of the original VM. I am done within a half hour. You should have seen my son's face the first time that he screwed up the VM. He could not believe that I just blew away the VM with all his data on it. He learned very quickly after that to keep backups of everything that he wants to keep.
So basically its total BS..
Basically, that is the way that I see it. There is no other way for them to tell if I watched the commercials.
If they really wanted accurate data they would pay you to wear an RFID tag so they could tell if you were even in the room while things are playing, and install software on your DVR to tell them exactly what was on the screen.
When my wife signed us up, I really assumed that they would have some type of electronic device that would track everything or they would have a way to pull the info from the DVRs.
If they really wanted to be accurate, they would get together with the different providers of the DVRs, Cable boxes, Sat receivers, etc and add the ability to log all the needed data. You would have to also build in the capability for the user to shut off the logging so that people will not complain about their privacy being invaded. You could then upload the logs on a nightly basis from all the users that allow it and compile it. There is so many ways that you could slice the data. There is enough people that would be willing to do this that you would get pretty accurate numbers. You would also get the numbers year round instead of the one week a year as it is in the current system.
I bet that there are ways to tag the individual commercials so that they can track which commercials are actually being watched. They could compile this data and sell it to the add companies so that they have better data on what catches peoples attention. I also notice that a lot of times, I will watch the first commercial before I remember that I can fast forward. I usually also catch the end of the last commercial. They could sell this info to the TV stations which could use that data to justify charging more for the first and last commercials in a break.
I'm curious as to how these statistics were collected. Do the Nielsen people have technology installed in the DVRs now? I'd be surprised if our DVRs aren't being data-mined yet.
I actually one of the Nielsen families this year, my wife signed us up and we were selected. I was actually surprised that it was very low tech. You are given a booklet for each TV in your house. You have to hand write in the information. There is a column to fill out if you watch something that was DVR'd. I used that column for almost everything I watched. Since each row is a 15 minute time block, if you took more then 45 minutes to watch an hour long show, you would have either have to shorten the time to 45 minutes or say that it took 60 minutes to watch the show. I assume that if you lengthened it to 60, they said you watched the adds. On 30 minute shows, most people probable did what I did and just marked down that it took 30 minutes. Every couple shows, I would have a 15 minute show so that the time would match up again. on top of all that, there is no way to track the number of times that I paused the shows, to do something else (get a drink, eat, use the bathroom, take care of the kids, etc) So, I would not trust any of the data about commercials at all.
the warrant is against the company holding the email, not against you.
The warrant might be presented to the ISP, but it is for a specific persons email.
The Article compares it essentially to when the government seizes property that is in the possession of a third party, it only has to notify the third party, not the property owner. I am not a lawyer and don't play at being one. But, outside of internet related cases, have you ever heard of a warrant being issued to person "A" that states is does not want person "A's" property, just the property that person "A" is holding for person "B".
A good example would be: Has there ever been a warrant issued directly to the USPS/UPS/FedEx for all mail/packages sent to/from Person "B" that did not require that person "B" be notified of the warrent?
but something with 7000 batteries that cost $100k and can only hold two people is just not viable transportation. Nice toy-not a real vehicle.
Which of the three make it not not viable transportation or a real vehicle? The fact that it has 7000 batteries should not factor in at all. Would you feel better if it was just one big battery of equivalent size? As for the $100k and 2 person point, most sports cars over $100k are only 2 person cars. So, are they also not real vehicles. For you they might not be feasible but for someone that does not have kids, has a relatively short commute, and can afford it, it is viable transportation and I bet a lot of fun.
When most new technologies are released, they are usually priced where the average person can not afford it. But over time either the price will come down or newer cheaper versions are build. Look at the cost of the first Plasma TVs that came out, they were around $10k to $15K. Enough people bought them at that price that the price started dropping and other vendors started producing cheaper and better quality TVs. The same happened with PCs, Gaming consoles, DVD players, Blue-Ray, and the list goes on. The same thing will happen here. Tesla is already working on a new model (http://www.teslamotors.com/models/index.php) that is cheaper ($50K), has better range and can hold more than 2 people.
Even better if you can follow it up within the next few days with "do you see that woman? Her tummy is big because a baby is growing inside".
("How did the baby get inside mummy's tummy?" "Daddy put it there.")
That's all well and good until your child goes up to that lady and says that "my daddy says that you are going to have a baby", and it turns out that she is not really pregnant.
So you are saying that our whole freaking planet is a reality show? agh!
Get me an intergalactic lawyer. I am going to sue! I never signed a release form to allow them to put me on a TV show.
but what I recall of it was the idea that, as the Solar system passes through the galactic plane, we're inundated with far more dust than while outside it.
I admit that I am not an astronomy expert, but I thought that we travelled around the center of the galaxy in the galactic plane and that we pass thru the spiral arms. It is the spiral arms that have the large concentrations of stars and dust.
if you look closely at the article, this is something that the air force did between 2005-2007. so this is actually old news. 'The Air Force began the project in 2005 and finished installing the new configuration on systems in 2007. In contracts with hardware providers it demanded that vendors pre-load the special Windows XP configuration onto systems before delivering them to the Air Force.'
The Zero Gravity Corporation (http://www.gozerog.com/) alone has had over 4000 passengers on their vomit comets. I know that it is not sub orbital or orbital flight. But it does show that people will pay even if they are not the first. After the first person dished out $10-20 million to take a ride on the Soyuz spacecraft and visit the ISS, it hasn't stopped other people from doing the same. Also, Virgin Galactic (http://www.virgingalactic.com/), who does not even have the plane built yet, is already taking reservations. This is just three examples that I know of. If I were to do any research, I bet I could find a bunch more example.
I was just looking into these the other day. If you want to spend the money, They have SSDs that erase to Military SPECs (http://www.stec-inc.com/technology/total_drive_protection.php). If you are really paranoid, they even have a destructive purge that will destroy the drive in 2 seconds.
I usually do the same thing but something I go a little further. I will not only fast forward through the annoying commercials but when I have recorded a baseball game I usually start getting annoyed with the announcers and I will start fast forwarded between pitches so that I do not have to listen to the them.
If my daughter was one of the kids in that school, I would be beating the $#!T out the those teachers. While I was doing it, I would keep telling them that THIS IS NOT A DRILL!
A better way to phrase your question would be to ask "How soon before we see the supernova?" And the answer is that no one knows the exact time. It could happen tomorrow, next year, or hundreds to thousands of years from now. There is no way to get that precise. To guess to within 1000 years would be similar to observing a 99 year old person for a couple minutes. Compare what we observed to what we know from observing other people of similar age. Then calculate, to within a day, when that person will die.
Section 4 also states that you can not imply the name Google. Wouldn't your statement fall under that?
Definitely not a cheap solution. Not only do you have to take into consideration the cost of hardware, but the time that your sys admin & whomever else that needs to be involved, will need to spend recovering the backup and then validating the recovery. It just comes down to is it worth the extra cost. If I am backing up the core of my business like databases that house my financial & customer info, or a system that has the only copy of the next issue of my magazine, then I would spend the money to have a system that I can use to test the recovery of my backups. If my systems are not critical to the success of my business and I really don't have the extra money to spend, then I would take the chance that I can recover my data.
It is also a very good practice to test the recovery of the backups on a regular basis. Just because the logs say that the backups ran successfully does not necessarily mean that the restore will work.