Posts by Charles 9 16605 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
"Humans are erratic, prone to error and can break down at any time for any number of reasons, but a human with training and experience can think outside the box, and create solutions where a computerised system will find none."
They can also MAKE THINGS WORSE, have you considered? You keep thinking Steely-Eyed Missile Men. I keep seeing Barney Fife, and history indicates the latter's more likely than the former.
But did they give some computerized "pilot" the same test to see what IT would've done? Your words seem to indicate that humans in general perform poorly when crap hits the fan and that successes like you describe are more down to luck than anything. Remember, you have United 232...and then you have Air France 447. Or maybe I should cite Korean Air Flight 801. Or any of a slew of others where pilot error was at least a significant if not the key factor.
"They've been trying so hard to pack more and more people into a plane and subtracted more and more things such as meals and checked luggage that I am more than happy to drive 2,000 miles."
Fine. Show me how one can DRIVE from Los Angeles to Honolulu...AND BACK...in less than a month.
Twin-sockets (which are 2.5mm, BTW) are probably older planes that haven't been refitted lately. A charter flight makes me think the plane's of that type: low priority on the maintenance budget. I think I last saw the tube-types around 1991, and the twin 2.5mm jobbers around 1992. Since around 2006, every plane I flew in that had video in it had the 3.5mm jack. I know because I brought and used my own headphones (modestly-priced over-the-ear noise-canceling phones that make transoceanic flights a little less ear-wracking).
They prefer to destroy "The Club" because it leaves the steering wheel intact, raising its fence value. Anyway, the can's not THAT expensive and easy to buy in an auto parts store. Its covert factor makes it worth the buy unless you can find one of those smaller bolt cutters you can conceal in a jacket.
"Presumably some logistical reason for the change, surely can't have been cost?"
I think it WAS cost-related. Much easier to just install some wires and a bog-standard audio port in the armrest than a pair of tiny speakers. Plus by switching to the 3.5mm standard, more people brought their own, meaning fewer loaner headsets needed to be cycled in and out. Probably wasn't as practical early on, but once the Walkman craze hit (late 80's), ubiquity made things easier.
That's what I'd just said, only more genteelly ("This isn't going to end well.") ANY attempt to right the ship will spark outcry and possibly even political upheaval (such as storming the polls).
As for the US, the most stated reasons the average person doesn't like anything close to the NHS are (1) they don't want to support "slovenly" lifestyles, and (2) they don't trust the State to do it right (and when challenged, they'll admit NO ONE can do it right, but they'd rather a system run by shareholders than by politicians).
After all, why do rich Canadians come to the US for their healthcare (what they neglect to mention is that medical tourism goes BOTH ways: Americans are finding it cheaper to get their operations done in Asia--WITH the airfare).
"Fundamentally, even with the best organisation, working practises staff, IT in the world etc, there's no way round the crux of the problem - when the nhs was setup the average life expectancy post retirement was 3-4 yrs .. now it's pushing towards longer spent in retirement than working. And we can cure or treat way more (much more expensively). I recall a panel of nhs docs, consultants etc on C4 prior to the 2015 election .. with completely straight faces they all agreed the public needed to be told what's what and that income tax had to be over 60% for everyone at least to even come close to the funding the nhs needs."
And therein lies the biggest problem for ANY healthcare system you can imagine. Everyone wants it, no one wants to pay for it, and since it's a LITERAL matter of life and death, any attempt to try to insert reason into the discussion invokes backlash at the least, riots at the worst.
In a nutshell, like it or not, this isn't going to end well.
It's simple. 11.5/8.8 = 1.3068181... = 130.68181..%
Meaning Germany spend ~31% more in terms of GDP percentage than the UK. Now, does that number mean anything? Probably not.
Now, as for solving the problem long-term, that's a sticky wicket because healthcare inevitably has to deal with humans on both ends of the equation. You have patients who demand results and can be limited in their ability to choose, depending on circumstances. Plus they VOTE, meaning anything unpopular that looks like you're killing people will likely be responded at the polls. Meanwhile, any large undertaking is going to be subject to Bureaucracy and everything that entails. The only way to deal with it is to produce a better human being. Good luck.
"Which brings me to the next problem. Someone (even if it's google!) need to provide a secure centralised service for firmware / software updates that's completely agnostic to manufacturer's own support commitments."
HAH! ANYONE who tried would just be painting a big, fat bullseye on their backs!
"There was a time about 1996 that distributed news groups were the melting pot of discussions on all topics - both moderated and unmoderated. It was a jungle - especially the ALT groups. You quickly learned about your own comfort zone."
I guess I'm more used to Usenet as being the file sharing channel of choice before Napster appeared along with all the evolutions of P2P sharing. For me, the discussions were all realtime on IRC using Efnet and Dalnet servers.
"Human society would not function if that was the case."
What do you think's happening RIGHT NOW? With social structure strained, things are getting rather dicey.
"Humans function best in small groups. Introduce any pressure on environmental resources and there will be competition between groups."
Those "other tribes" become the "neighbours" I mentioned, so my argument still holds. When the basics aren't so hard to get (read: you don't have to hunt everyday just to have dinner), the necessary size of the "tribe" shrinks until it's down to family units (houses, neighbours, etc.). Especially when a larger social structure creates a disconnect between the top and the bottom. Instead of food and water, it's spouses, good schooling, connections, and so on. It's the same thing as the jungle, only structured a little differently.
No, the Web is just an application of the Internet. The Internet ITSELF (as in the network) is the thing that enables this mass communication; the Web is just the favored method of using the Internet. If it had never existed, the Internet would almost certainly still be an enabler: only replace the Web with IRC chat rooms, MUDs through telnet/SSH, etc.
I disagree. Somewhere along the way, someone's gonna cheat. It's damned human instinct: get a leg up on the neighbours, and so on. Even if there were such an upheaval as you describe, pretty soon someone's gonna cheat, take advantage, and we'll be back in it all over again. We're just on the tag end of the current cycle, with the added caveat that people are showing a willingness to kill 'em all and not even bother with the sorting. Perhaps that's why we haven't found any other civilisations in space...
"Hopefully someone very smart will come along soon & find a way to stop people being such a bunch of greedy, selfish cnuts."
There is, although it probably won't happen. This time I use Star Trek. Do what the Vulcans did and evolve ourselves to control our irrational thinking. Otherwise, there will always be suckers who will take everyone else with us. Even if YOU don't submit, someone you know will submit YOU.
Whether or not the connection is encrypted doesn't help here. An HTTPS connection to a C&C server is just as bad: worse, actually, since the traffic can't be sniffed easily.
In any event, if the game needed network access to begin with (for legitimate updates and content downloads), that would easily disguise the malware download.
"So in your example the answer would be that it simply doesn't need to."
My two numbers would look IDENTICAL to the phone exchange (it never sees the dashes), so it can't tell which is which, and the two could be across the country. That's the main reason there are still some telephone number rules: to prevent such a scenario.
Even an open numbering scheme is bound to have some kinds of rules so the phone exchange knows how to connect the call (ex. In the US, until about 25 years ago, area codes were required to have a middle digit of 0 or 1, and even now area codes and exchange numbers--the first three digits of the local number--cannot have a first digit of 0 or 1 because those trigger special functions when dialed first). Otherwise, how would a telephone exchange distinguish between (just a quickie example) 1234-56-7890 versus 12-345-67890?
Concorde wasn't BIG enough, and as for the suborbitals, I think the big problem is that the higher you go, not only do you lose air pressure, you lose OXYGEN (part and parcel since oxygen is part of the air), making it hard to light the oxygen-dependent jet fuel you need to propel yourself. Not to mention the aerodynamics change the further you get from the troposphere. Finally lifting anything UP costs, dearly, in terms of energy expenditure. The higher up you try, the more effort it takes. That's why space flight is so tricky: the acceleration needed is incredible if you look at the numbers. Aircraft at ~35,000 feet probably represents the optimal expenditure of effort to get hundreds of people from A to B at any given time. Can this equilibrium change? Possibly? Will it be by the Hyperloop? Probably not, or we'd be seeing more pneumatic delivery systems for smaller objects like you see at places like hospitals.
That depends on the network links in service at the time as well as the size of the final video file. Given they're high-resolution (they were doing 4K well before television, if you'll recall, and are pushing for 8K), high-channel files, they'll probably be pretty large (a BluRay can hold up to 100GB and most typically lean towards 50GB). Even with decent connections, downloading 50GB files one at a time is going to take some time: probably an overnight job. You could probably do it if it's planned out in advance as is typical of theatrical runs (the key would be the last thing to be sent, preventing premature screenings). If the infrastructure isn't as robust, it might be easier to post portable media in rotation to achieve the same effect.
"The argument is that low-frequency sound from a sub-woofer is not very directional"
Because you normally don't HEAR low-frequency sounds so much as FEEL them. Some of these you don't feel through the air but through the ground. That's why most setups say you don't have to aim the subwoofer towards the audience and that corner placements have an amplifying effect (two walls to shake) .
What you're experiencing is high dynamic audio range: in this case too high for your equipment and/or your ears. It's like what high gamut did later for videos. The belief is that it's better to preserve the original range since you can adjust this later at your end. Once the range is compressed in the mastering process, you can't go back (see the discussion about the expiration of the MP3 patents).
The solution in your case will be to check your amp for a setting called Dynamic Range Compression or DRC. This will bring up the softs and tone down the louds to put things in a more comfortable range for you.
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