Comment Re:I know you're trying to be funny, but... (Score 1) 739
Now, now, now, it's not the version control system's fault that you checked in a bug....
Now, now, now, it's not the version control system's fault that you checked in a bug....
I got the same error after a glitch. Turns out the redemption was successful the first time, but because the server was too slow responding to the redemption request, the App Store app timed out. For whatever bizarre reason, it appears that the app store server infrastructure doesn't treat redemption requests as idempotent (clearly a bug), so subsequent attempts to redeem the same code from the same account fail. Ideally, those subsequent attempts should do nothing, but should return whatever magic value tells the App Store app to update its list of purchased items and then do whatever other work it needs to do.
To make a long story short, if you quit the App Store app and relaunch it, the Yosemite beta should appear under the Purchases tab in the App Store. From there, you can start the download.
A nonprofit competitor is required by law to spend any profits they make on upgrading infrastructure. So unless they massively overhire or have higher expenses because of economies of scale or renting a more expensive building, the nonprofit is pretty much guaranteed to be able to undercut any for-profit competitor while providing better service, because it doesn't have the extra overhead of profit taking.
Particularly if all you need is heat. You could potentially build an almost entirely passive desalinization plant fairly readily by building a greenhouse atop the ocean and making the roof slope towards the sides with catch basins that then flow downhill towards the shore. The only thing required is an insane amount of glass (and an insane amount of space to dedicate to it).
Rum, of course. Or, if you prefer, vodka.
In theory, you can always learn more by continuing to study something. In practice, though, modern medicine has a pretty complete knowledge of smallpox. Humans have been studying the disease since before anyone even knew what a virus was. There's evidence that the Chinese were inoculating people for smallpox over a thousand years ago. And the first practical, widespread form of that vaccine dates back to the late 1700s. This was literally the very first virus ever treated with a vaccine. It's well-trodden ground, research-wise.
The problem is, this virus is highly contagious and relatively dangerous compared with other viruses. For variola major, the case fatality rate is typically 30–60%, which puts it among the worst communicable diseases out there, approaching the fatality rate of ebola, and far more contagious. With nearly a two-week average incubation period (and up to 17 days in the worst case), one minor screw-up could easily cause a very serious pandemic before enough vaccines could be produced and distributed.
So basically, you have to weigh the odds of an accidental release (which, with recent revelations about this stuff getting lost for decades, then turning up by accident, seems not so improbable) against the relatively small chance of learning anything new from it that can't also be learned from cowpox or other similar viruses. On the risk-reward curve, this seems to be so far towards the "pure risk" end that any reward would border on undeniable proof of divine intervention, which means the speculated rewards would have to be pretty darn amazing for it to be worth the risk.
What could possibly be gained from further experimentation at this point? We already know how to isolate it and how to produce vaccines for it. And for gene therapy, there are lots of other, less dangerous viruses that can be used as vectors for delivering genetic material. It seems that keeping anything more than the bare minimum amount of material needed to produce vaccines would fall pretty far towards the risk end of the risk-reward curve.
The SyFy version involves a pro wrestler playing the technician. Oh, and the plucky daughter just found out she's pregnant.
Well, that's not entirely true. The voice quality of analog phones has steadily improved, so the amount of data did go up a little bit in that hundred years.
But seriously, we hit a wall with copper, and it only took a hundred years to get there. A single pair (or even a bonded double pair) of copper just can't cut it. But a single fiber provides more than enough growth potential. The current record is 100 terabit over a single fiber, or 100,000 times what most fiber providers currently provide. I figure that's good for another hundred years. Even governments can move at that speed.
Can anyone explain this situation to me?
At least in my case, you're missing the mark. I've always thought that our state and federal governments were pretty close to incompetent, and I still do. But government-funded nonprofit corporations do work, and at the local level, governments sometimes work.
That long cycle worked fine for the telephone lines that serve your house. They served us well for a long time. The biggest flaw was that instead of managing the infrastructure themselves, they gave it to private companies to manage. Then, when they started abusing the monopoly, the government had to turn around and start requiring them to allow CLECs to use the lines. The phone companies, predictably, hated this, and did the absolute least that they could do to comply with the regulations, often refusing to fix problems with lines while blaming it on the CLEC (and vice versa).
All those problems would have been avoided if the government had simply maintained exclusive control over the lines and leased them out to third parties. That's how next-generation fiber networks in cities should be set up. The entire premise of letting a few companies maintain exclusive control over critical infrastructure is fundamentally flawed and can only lead to more of the same bulls**t we've had for the last two decades.
The only scheme that works is the public utility scheme, where the government owns the wires and private companies provide the service. We know this model works because it has worked with our interstate highway system and private shipping companies for decades. Is it perfect? No. The government historically hasn't charged those shippers enough money in gas taxes to cover infrastructure maintenance costs, resulting in some roads falling into disrepair. But that's mainly a problem caused by lack of a single management body that manages all of the roads in a region. Dozens of city governments working together isn't a great way to get things done except on an "It burns! It burns!" emergency basis. The solution to that problem, of course, is for all the cities in a metropolitan area to get together to form a non-profit corporation, and make that corporation responsible for the management and leasing of lines a la TVA.
And they added commercial radio equipment to warships to ensure that it would never happen again. One would hope that the Russians did similar things to their anti-aircraft batteries after hearing of that incident. If they didn't, one might reasonably ask what in hell is wrong with Russia. And if they did, one might reasonably ask what in hell is wrong with the people who fired that missile today without taking the time to use the equipment.
No, it isn't particularly interesting how it ended up in the middle of a war zone. Not at all. The area in question is not closed to civil aviation, or at least it wasn't prior to this incident. The aircraft was flying about a hundred miles off its usual flight path, which is a completely reasonable deviation when avoiding inclement weather as they were. Presumably, the deviation was approved by the Ukrainian civil aviation authorities.
If I were their registrar, I'd probably resell the name to someone who would hold it hostage, just to make a point. This is the easiest thing in the world to avoid, just by having some basic policies in place.
Require that all ongoing accounts be set up to send email to role accounts that forward to multiple people (an email list). Have a policy where any employee termination/retirement triggers an automatic check of all role accounts, and if it results in a role account with no recipients (or, ideally, below some higher threshold), the current IT head has to start contacting managers until they can sort out who should be responsible.
Had Sony done this, it wouldn't be a problem.
The Gas car, our behavior is to fuel it up once a week.
The Electric car, should be charged nightly. So people will need to change their behaviors to charge the car every night.
Changing behaviors doesn't quite cover it. If a car has to be charged nightly, that means it doesn't have enough range to do many of the things people do with gasoline-powered cars, which makes it of significantly lower utility. I was ready to pull the trigger on a RAV4 EV the second it hit the market... until they announced the range on the thing. At that point, I realized that it will just barely handle my daily commute when brand new, which means that in a couple of years, when the battery is down to... say 97% of its factory capacity, I would have to spend over ten grand to replace the battery pack. There's no way to change behavior that would somehow work around such a huge loss of functionality. I would gladly pay more money for a car that has sufficient capacity. However, I will not buy a car for any price unless it does. For me, that means a 200-mile range at a bare minimum, and preferably a 300-mile range.
Call me when the electric cars have to be charged once every three or four days. That's the point where they'll finally be practical for real-world use. Until then, they're just too impractical, as much as I wish that weren't so. And no, I won't even consider Toyota's proposed insane hydrogen fuel "solution", which just shifts the carbon problem to wherever they extract the hydrogen from natural gas, not to mention being impossible to refuel using solar power (which is the main point of moving to an EV from my perspective). Calling a hydrogen-powered car "clean" is quite possibly the biggest lie since "clean coal".
Where there's a will, there's a relative.