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There's a Sucker Converted Every Minute
Ponca City, We love you writes "Once the US converts from analog to digital broadcasting next February, those who receive their signals over the air will need a converter box for older, non-digital models. Government-approved converter boxes sell for $60 or less and a government-issued $40 rebate coupon is available for the asking but that hasn't stopped companies like the Ohio-based Universal TechTronics from offering supposedly free converter boxes. The gimmick: the box is free, as long as you pay $88 for a five-year warranty, plus $9.30 shipping. Universal TechTronics seems to specialize in 'high-tech' products of questionable value, marketing the Cool Surge portable air cooler, 'a work of engineering genius from the China coast so advanced that no windows, vents, or freon are needed' that uses the same energy as a 60-watt light bulb. It works by blowing a stream of air over two ice packs that you have previously frozen in your freezer. What's the best tech scam you've heard of lately?"
"We have to filter P2P to solve network congestion"--Bell Canada.
If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
DVD rewinders.
The "free" digital TV box gimmick is not necessarily a scam. Comparing a box with a 5 year warranty to one with a 1 year warranty is not a fair comparison. It's gimmicky pricing to make people think they're getting a great deal. A scam, on the other hand, requires deception to secure an unfair or unlawful gain. In this case, the user is getting a 5 year warranty rather than the typical 1 year warranty, so it is understandable the overall cost should be higher, meaning it's not an unfair or unlawful gain.
(It could be argued that warranties aren't worth the paper they're written on. If a warranty is not workable, that's the part you can call a scam, not the gimmicky pricing.)
I've seem some scams recently, but the most amazing has to be Kinoki Foot Pads. Let's ignore the fact that my understanding is the word "kinoki" is meaningless and the characters they use in the ad don't even read "kinoki".
I'm used to all sorts of pseudo science in TV ads, but this one is downright amazing. Did you know tree roots are used to dispose of chemicals, and that my feet are actually tree roots? I'm so glad someone told me. I especially love the list of conditions that these things can cure. Even if they weren't fake and actually would detoxify you, I seriously doubt it would even touch many of those conditions. I seem to remember reading someone wrapped carrots with the pads just to prove that anything will make them blacken from "toxins".
The ad id just amazing. I was dumbfounded the first time I saw it. Diet pill ads look like something out of the Mayo Clinic in comparison.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
It could be the fact you need a dual core machine with 2 gigs to browse the web now.
"It works by blowing a stream of air over two ice packs that you have previously frozen in your freezer." means = "no freon"?
Well, then I'm also selling water-free water for places that have water shortages. Just add 1 cup of water to the device and you will have an entire cup of water that you can drink!
New webcomic updated on Sundays: HERE
The 'coupon' you can get that covers 40 bucks of the price expires. Sometimes before people can actally find a converter box.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
The real tech scam: you have to upgrade your PC every two years to run the latest and greatest versions of Windows and Office.
My blog
no. CO2 can be removed from the atmosphere without "destroying" anything. plant a tree, that tree takes in CO2, water, nutrients and with light can synthesize organic compounds locked up in the tree its self. no magical violations of laws of physics required.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
So, if I have spare room in my freezer and it's already running 24/7, does it take more energy if there's more items in it?
I assume freezers operate based on cooling the air to, say, -5C. If that's the case, if something has a high specific heat (like water) it doesn't take more energy for it to cool it, it just takes longer for it to cool.
So, that ice-pack AC-like machine would use less electricity (if you don't use your freezer for food)?
Not that it's so practical since you'd constantly need to be changing and refreezing the packs, but it might be greener in that respect. Of course, getting a smaller freezer would probably be even greener.
Am I completely off base?
You don't need techobabble to put one over on people ...
Just look at the erpackaging of crap loans and blessing them with AAA ratings, and the proposal to bail out those who participated in the scam.
Time was, the three biggest lies were "The check is in the mail", "I'll still love you in the morning", and "I won't come in your mouth."
Now its "Mission Accomplished!", "Housing prices never go down," and "Jebus loves you- gimme money!"
How many watts does a 60 watt lightbulb use?
Do you mean other than those $60 converter boxs and $40 Government coupons that expire in less than 80 days after people receive them? The coupons are a great deal for the importers and sellers, but in reality the customer ends up paying about whet they would if there were no coupon program, perhaps more when you realize they pay sales tax on the entire ticket price. In a world where I can buy a DVD player in a local store for $29 or less, these much simpler converter boxes should not be costing $60.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Vista comes with a First Person Shooter?
Let me guess - you score points by killing penguins with thrown chairs, you buy armour by making campaign contributions, and you power up by eating up all the ram chips lying around.
Well, the cell phone antenna booster "stickers" were probably the single best tech scam. It combined laughably ineffective "technology" with the always successful price-so-low-it-doesn't-matter-if-they-don't-work.
More recently, I'm still astounded by the number of "BOOST YOUR MPG!" schemes that involve additives or random crap shoved in your air intake. I especially love the accusations from promoters that the auto manufacturers are in it with the oil companies. GM and Ford are both facing a very real possibility of chapter 11 bankruptcy, and the word is that Cerberus is quietly readying a giant hammer of doom over at Chrysler. If all it took was a $2 piece of metal to get 9 more mpg out of a Malibu, don't you think they'd have done it by now? See the cell phone boosters for the basic premise: if you only charge $40 for one of these things, people won't be too pissed when they find out that it doesn't work.
There are many MLM schemes that differentiate themselves from the regular Amway crowd by pitching websites that MAKE YOU MONEY. I was actually approached by two different classmates about five years ago regarding the scheme, and it was so comically bad to anyone with any kind of tech knowledge that you couldn't help but laugh. Picture MLM combined with an Amazon-style referral bonus for online purchases. Now charge someone $400 to participate, and charge extra for adding basic things to their company website. Now make sure the websites resemble GeoCities circa 1997. Now we're talking!
My other favorite is the speaker scam, which someone tried to pull on me about two weeks ago (I hadn't heard of these for years). It's not really a tech scam, just your basic grift that happens to involve technology: an "installer" got an extra set of speakers/surround sound system/plasma TV accidentally loaded in his van for a big install job. Last time this happened, his boss reamed him a new one for not noticing in the first place, then sold them and kept the cash himself. Installer figures he'd "cut out the middleman" and you look like the kind of guy who knows good equipment. Usually they're selling actual speakers or receiver (the plasma scams generally involved an oven door in a box with a window), and they often have some custom-made audio magazine with their brand of speaker on the cover and a great review inside. You end up buying $20 worth of garbage for $200. Dogg Digital and Kirsch were the big names in the white van speaker scam years ago. Google them for an entertaining and depressing look at human nature.
I have a 20 month old Samsung 46" LCD TV. It now needs over $700 in repairs because of one of two blown video boards. So if had paid for the extended warranty I would already paid in that $700 - so it's a wash either way. If I paid $700 for the TV (e.g a smaller one), with or without any warranty at all, it's actually cheaper to throw the TV off the fucking roof and get a new one.
Retailers love to offer 5 year extended warranty because of the Bathtub Curve.
Basically if a product does n't fail within one year then the probability it failing within five year years is very very low.
This curve applies very well to consumer electronics with the added advantage that they depreciate in value quickly too.
Of course, Made in Eureka...
Don't underestimate the power of The Source
That type of cooler is called an evaporative or swamp cooloer. It's no air conditioner, but it can be effective in some cases and is definitely not a tech scam.
"Even when I say nothing it's a beautiful use of negative space." - Indelible, "Fire In Which You Burn"
You want a tech scam? Have it: Just type Car runs on water in Google; Sit back and enjoy! http://www.runningcaronwater.com/?gclid=COnhtJPKqZQCFRZZiAod_mOtzw http://www.runcarbywater.com/ http://www.youralternativefuelsite.com/?gclid=CLyItLbKqZQCFQwxiQodyUlR0A http://www.runcaronwaterkit.com/?kk=142 http://hybridfuelreview.info/?id=B227023 http://savemorefuel.info/?t202id=9163299&t202kw=car%20runs%20on%20water http://www.waterfuelx.com/?hop=tracassoc&gclid=CJne49_KqZQCFQL8iAodz2TG0Q http://www.trustmymechanic.com/run-your-car-on-water.html?gclid=CNjKkujKqZQCFSBciAodV1U90A http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/354/C8115/ http://www.squidoo.com/carrunsonwater http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5EMoLMzB-Y http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/car-runs-on-water-inventor-to-be-kidnapped-by-exxon-177716.php http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water-fuelled_car http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=84561 http://www.easywatercar.com/2books.htm
Check this out: when I was working as a film-developing monkey for a large drugstore chain, we had a computer dedicated to downloading pictures from a VERY well-known maker of disposable cameras. One day, the tech had to come in to upgrade the computer so that it could dowload pictures from bluetooth devices. The tech opened up the computer and explained to me that he had to remove a piece of "epoxy"(which was a small blob of harmless rubber cement on the mainboard) which clearly obstructed nothing ad served no purpose whatsoever. Then, he put in a driver CD to enable bluetooth functionality. It was absurd! Why crack the box open at all? My guess was to rationalize an obscene price by making a simple driver install an illusion of a "ZOMG hardware surgery performed by a engineer".
Absurd.
My laptop with vista is noticeably faster than my desktop with XP (with the exception of network transfer speed), even though they have the same specs (2.1ghz core 2 duo, 2gb ram. The desktop has a better videocard).
For me at least XP seems to get much slower with age while vista does not do so. Yah, a fresh install of XP is blinding fast, even more so than Ubuntu IMO, but after several weeks just slows to a crawl (yah I scandisk, reg clean, defrag, spyware/virus check, etc) while Vista takes a couple days to get fast (due to indexing and prefetching, or whatever they call it).
First, you have to accept that you can't just create "heat" or "cold" from nothing, nor can you destroy it. You can, however, move it from one place to another. As water freezes into ice, it absorbs "cold" from the local environment. Similarly, when it melts, it releases the "cold" into the surroundings. That's how the ice-pack air conditioner works.
"Hot" and "cold" are basically the same thing, only with opposite polarities. The above thermal exchange could be viewed as "melting ice absorbs heat" and "freezing ice releases heat." So the thing you really need to worry about is the ice pack moving heat into your freezer. With more items in the freezer, you have a bigger "cold" buffer which will offset the "heat" dumped into the freezer by the freezing water. Remember, "heat" can't be destroyed, only moved. It's just a matter of time until the "heat" accumulates to a problematic level.
I run a small business on the side, helping people deal with Catastrophic Retention of Accumulated Pthermions in their home refrigeration systems. For a nominal fee, I can have a crew come over and purge the pthermions from your freezer, ensuring years of continued, reliable service.
Well some types of trees last hundreds of years without any attention. I'm wondering if a massive tree planting drive would make any difference or would it bearly scratch the surface?
But, which Vista? There are many, and the baseline versions don't run Aero. Got Aero?
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.
Just imagine how much FASTER it would be with XP or Linux...
Once the tree dies, its carbon goes right back into the air.
Is spontaneous combustion a big problem for trees in you area?
Fnord.
I think I hear coders working on that right now in flash just because.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I bought a DVD VCR combo from Frys that only recorded to the VHS tape. I only learned this when I took it home and read the manual. The sign on the shelf clearly called it a 'DVR' even said it was 'compatible with DVD+-R' but not that it recorded to DVD. I had to take it back. They said that the sign was not misleading saying that a DVD player was 'digital' and the VCR was the 'video recorder' part. Then I had my wife try to take it back and she had no problems. I wonder if it was a scam or incompetence.
Hard to say as people cut down trees quicker than they can plant them.
It seems like folly to use carbon credits to plant trees that will be cut down as soon as someone has a need for paper or wood or some other product they use trees for.
Common sense says don't drive short distances to get that $5 cup of coffee and instead invest in a Mr. Coffee machine and brew your own coffee or just quit drinking coffee and drink water instead.
It would actually make more sense to just build canals and use them to transport food and products than using trucks that burn gas and contribute to the CO2 levels in global warming. Many people forget that it was George Washington who was one of the founding fathers for building canals in the colonies before the USA was formed. That the USA got rid of canals as soon as the coal burning railroads got started.
I mean it would make better common sense to just stop using technology that puts CO2 in the atmosphere, than to keep using technology that puts CO2 in the atmosphere and then buy carbon credits and hope it just goes away magically because Al Gore said so.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
These audiophile things offend me. I realize some people like to mess with their hardware to make it look pretty in their eyes (ricers, for example) but to claim such "behind-the-scenes" hardware mods do anything except drain the bank accounts of the ignorant is beyond the pale and simply a scam perpetrated by those who know better.
Heat pumps can move far more heat than the energy they consume doing it. So much so, that people are now using them to warm their homes, as well as cool them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_source_heat_pump
AC is expensive because people design houses and offices with giant windows which both let the sunshine in and keep the heat from getting out. And then build them in Texas.
I'm doing the same thing running XP, and even office 2007 - runs just fine. But I wouldn't even try to put vista on it.
Organic matter still decomposes. In any case, I was just trying to shed some light on why someone might think the "carbon credits" thing was a scam. I personally don't think that it is. But I do think that people need to watch out for these awareness drives that originate at a company's marketing department. Like all of the pink products that show up during October, where they give half a percent of sales to breast cancer research. Doesn't accomplish much besides allowing people to feel good about not actually doing anything. I think carbon credits is like an awareness scheme...OK I'm aware now, that feels better.
I don't believe you.
Yes it's a well-known bug in XP that the code get tired after several weeks of use because there's a qi-leak.
Now, why not take that weak shit to the park? Maybe the squirrels will believe it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
...laser rot? You could buy a green Magic Marker for about $20, paint the edges of your CDs with it, and not worry about the laser rotting the bits off.
Or the $400 Denon Cat5 cable only last week?
And there was a $10 gadget heavily advertised in general-interest magazines in the Seventies, especially Sunday supplements, that was designed to LOOK as if you could pirate cable TV with it. You just hooked it up to the antenna terminals on your TV and presto, you would get "the same type of programs you'd get on cable" -- i.e., sports, movies, news -- but you wouldn't have to pay monthly bills "because you're not getting cable!" What it was, was a rabbit-ears antenna with a plastic disk in the middle shaped like a dish antenna.
The prose in the ad was a masterpiece of subtlety. There was not a single misstatement of fact in it, but innumerable people read as a pitch for something like the pirate HBO setups that were in the news then.
rj
It's the same as saying "my car runs on electricity, it's completely pollution free and carbon neutral!"
Hydrogen is not a fuel. It's a way of storing and transporting energy. That energy has to come from somewhere - generally fossil or nuclear fueled power plants. Free hydrogen does not naturally exist on earth, it has to be manufactured, stored and transported at enormous cost in energy. The overall efficiency is crap.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
I'm not sure if you're serious or not, so I'll explain. When you buy a carbon credit, it doesn't remove CO2. Duh. What it does is increase the demand (and therefore the price) of carbon credits. Then, polluting factories that *have* to buy these things to continue operating are forced to pay more for them. At some point the price of having to buy carbon credits outweighs the price of just buying cleaner machinery/power plants/etc. The point of the whole carbon credit system is to use "free market forces" to achieve a goal (cleaner factories) by causing an artificial shortage (of carbon credits).
Wow, step in dogshit this morning?
http://www.principledtechnologies.com/Clients/Reports/Microsoft/VistaSP1XPVistaHomeResp0208.pdf
Looks like the study was sponsored by MS, so that probably won't sway you, but either way I don't give a shit. Perhaps you're right, my qi-enhanced magical laptop just has its meridians inline while my desktop must have liver fire rising.
You seem to be misreading my point, coward -- I use Windows every day, at work and home (where it runs under Parallels on my Macbook.) Lots of great software runs under it, the benefits are tangible and positive.
Vista, however, was marketed as a speedy, pretty *new* O/S. I'd expected a redesigned kernel to do better than it actually does.
I've been programming and using computers since teletype days (jr. high anyways.) That O/Sen require so much horsepower bothers me so. The Vista upgrade at work ran too slow on my core2duo Dell laptop, so I downgraded to XP, sadly. Yes, even OS X runs slower than I'd like. There's always Linux for compute-intensive jobs, however.
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.
Common sense says don't drive short distances to get that $5 cup of coffee and instead invest in a Mr. Coffee machine and brew your own coffee or just quit drinking coffee and drink water instead.
Well you know how they say you should be active 15-20mins a day? I've found that by choosing not to drive I get my daily dose of activity in spades. :)
Makes it hard to get to that odd concert some times but the sheer satisfaction I feel as another black SUV rolls by driven by a cellphone attatched to a human...
The real scam imho is we've let 4 wheels and blacktop dictate how we build, where we live work and play and how we socialize...
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Is spontaneous combustion a big problem for trees in you area?
Not exactly, but combustion can still play a large roll in deciding the roll trees should play in carbon sequestration.
I submit Idaho for your consideration.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Q: What's the best tech scam you've heard of lately? A: Windows Vista.
Have you requested your free converter box from Uncle Sam yet? I certainly have! And no, I don't receive over-the-air television ... I've got DirecTV and I'm quite happy with it. But with the coupons, I can get a couple of free boxes with power supplies and RF modulators in them ... quite nice for various geek projects! One of them will probably be fitted as a simple RF modulator appliance so my son can play video games on his TV which only has an antenna input. The other ... who knows? Who cares? It's free! (More accurately, it's already paid for; it doesn't even begin to make up for the thousands of dollars the government steals from me each year.)
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
. . . gee, this story conjures up memories of Ronco ads for Ginsu's, Spiral Slicers, Pocket Fisherman's and *-O-Matics.
"In Japan, the hand can be used as a knife!"
"But this doesn't work on a digital television signal!"
Maybe a really humongous Cool Surge might be the answer to global warming?
Now that I have too much money to spend on high-tech gadgets that I don't need, I really feel the urge to buy a Spiral Slicer, and have a whack at a sack of potatoes . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
(and probably other places)
[ Yes, people really are that stupid. ]
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The parent post here deserves to be scored higher to combat the misinterpretations in the grandparent.
I can't imagine any of them work. But many must order them for the companies to keep running adverts.
While we're at throw in some of the many other items compliments of the current US administration.
that when you buy them, automagically remove all of the CO2 you contributed to global warming out of the atmosphere and make you carbon neutral.
Nope. The idea of carbon credits, AFAIK, is that there is a limited amount of them. If you pollute less than your allowed amount, you can sell your credits to someone who pollutes excessively.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Hey yeah and I agree with you.
Only people like that can make it all okay by buying carbon credits and then continue to drive black SUVs and chat on a cellphone to go 15 blocks to buy a $5 cup of coffee.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
That makes about as much sense as a church selling sin credits to stop people from sinning. Which is why some people think that global warming is just another religion.
Did you know that the whole cap and trade system of carbon credits was invented by Enron? Does that name ring a bell?
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
HDMI cables at the retail level are a scam. Best Buy sells a basic 6.5 foot HDMI cable for $60. I can get a 10-foot cable at a local computer shop, in bulk packaging, for $13. But Monster Cable is the worst. $80 for a 4-foot HDMI? Please. USB and firewire are equally as bad. $20 for a retail 10-foot usb, but $3 at a local shop.
Treating easily replicated digital bits exactly the same as tangible commodities, by (relatively) newly written laws and by industry practice, creating a purely artificial scarcity business model.
Digital copying is a huge game changing tech advancement, and society has fallen flat on dealing with it. It is one of the few "star trek" level tech advances in the past few generations, yet we can see that business society has freaked out, it made a lot of the older practices virtually unneeded, and wants both to be able to use this tech freely for themselves, and also to be able to restrict it to others, entirely in their favor following the old and now obsolete so called "laws" of supply and demand as they might pertain to such products today. There is the potential for unlimited and "so close to free it doesn't matter" supply now, so they are trying to restrict it through DRM and laws and lawsuits such as they can still extract the same (or more) level of profits "per unit" as when back in the day they had to actually publish a dead trees book or stamp out a vinyl album, etc.
What will we be seeing when we can do such replication as easy with tangible objects, if we can't even embrace and adapt to digital copies? This effort is not only ill conceived it should be *embarassing* to humanity in general, why it is even contemplated. We all should be enjoying the big freedom to freely share and share alike and have a huge expensive burden of transferring knowledge and culture from each of us and to all of us removed from our backs so we can concentrate on the next tech hurdles that could ultimately lead to humans being able to universally exist without a huge amount of drudgery and dangerous labor. Isn't that some sort of goal anyway?
It won't happen all at once, but every time we lick a major tech problem, like we have with copies of this or that chunk of knowledge or culture, why should we -or even allow- go out of our way to create an additional problem just to perpetuate the old problem, which has been solved now? This is illogical and makes no long view historical sense. Unless we want the space aliens to start calling this the planet of the buggywhip traders (part of the embarrassing part)
disclaimer: all I can do is not be hypocritical about it. I have a ton of digital stuff on the net over the past decade, if anyone thinks it might be useful (stop laffing!), take a copy share a copy, go for it. I work ag in meatspace, I encourage everyone who is so inclined to get seeds and "grow their own copies", use open pollinated so you can share copy making potential, go for it, feed yourself and the planet as cheaply and nutritiously as possible, leading to all free someday when the tech gets better. I seek no DRM restrictions or patents or any of that other nonsense on your ability or desire to produce your own food, even if that means I might theoretically make less, I'll be much happier once everyone is fed for cheap or free, and will go on to do something else. And that's the best I think I can do right now with voluntary sharing.
I used it for about 4 hours
Stop.
Back in the fricking' BETA, Vista would run fairly sluggishly for the first day or so, as it indexed every file you've got. Then, it ran more or less at a constant speed.
If you want to give Vista a test, give it at LEAST a week.
Now, it runs great, and uses about 2/3 the ram that was being consumed by Vista
Wait... you know enough to check the RAM, but not enough to do a google search for Vista using too much ram?.
(Hint: Vista is your memory manager. Why should it waste cycles loading and un-loading files so you can have "free" ram when it can just, you know, keep some in memory until a program actually asks for the space?)
Biggest tech scam right now, period.
Demand paging with a unified buffer cache is a difficult concept for laymen to grasp. They tend to think of memory being a finite resource that is used up, rather than simply another caching layer for permanent storage.
So what would be a good, simple number we can use to gauge an operating system's memory efficiency? Working set size? Pageins and pageouts on a typical workload?
The average person needs a number, at least some kind of letter grade.
There's also the idea that even with a unified buffer cache, an operating system can be memory-inefficient - bloated data structures and inefficient page-aging algorithms can make that 2GB of RAM seem like 1GB.
Is there any simple gauge of how well an operating system uses memory?
Been to northern California recently?
/ \
\ / ASCII ribbon campaign for peace
x
/ \
just build canals
And how are we going to move bardges along these canals?
Do you expect we go the traditional route and use draft animals along a tow path beside the canal? Not exactly as fast as truck.
Do we put engines in the boats? Back to the same carbon producing problem as the trucks, still much much slower.
The best idea I can think of is string overhead power lines over your canal, and use electic motors on the canal boats. Sorta like a trolly car on water. Still there are lots of problems. The canals will be difficult to keep free of ice in winder. There is no way canal boats are going to run as fast as trucks, which means they wont satisfy our food transportation needs well, and this is a big part of trucking. You still have to generate the electric power to run, which will probably produce carbon emmissions ( I remain unconviced this is actaully a problem, but the price of petrol certainly is so replaceing trucks would be good ). The canals will have to be two lans wide so traffic can move in both directions. You are also going to need sides, just like with rail roads, so lower priority slower traffic ( bigger bardges ) can lay over and allow others to pass. Dealing with the overhead power might be trick there. I think you going to have to do a lot of land grabs to get these built and going useful places which means the NIMBY crowd will be working hard to kill it. All and all I like the idea, boats on still water can be very efficent. Electric or animal power could be cheap compared to petrol. Implementation seems a bit out of reach though.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
(Hint: Vista is your memory manager. Why should it waste cycles loading and un-loading files so you can have "free" ram when it can just, you know, keep some in memory until a program actually asks for the space?)
The problem with Vista is that is does waste cycles loading and un-loading files.
Instead of working like every other cache system in the world, Superfetch tries to guess what files you might need in RAM. Based on the complaints, it appears that it guesses wrong most of the time.
What this does is needlessly keep the hard drive seeking to load files, then when the user does ask for a file to be opened, they have to wait until the Vista-initiated disk activity stops before their request gets serviced. That's just bad design, and it gets worse because of how much more power this causes laptops to use.
Last, when users turn off this feature, the system becomes more responsive to their requests. If that isn't a sign that the caching algoritm in Superfetch isn't broken, I'm not sure what would be.
What's wrong with that? It's driving the economy by getting people to go buy a new PC when otherwise they'd be using one that's like 5+ years old by now!
The Clarins Expertise 3P spray ranks up there in the top bracket on my list of tech scams. http://www.strangeharvest.com/mt/archive/the_harvest/spray_on_magnet_1.php Here's some of the juice on the spray... "An ultra-sheer screen mist containing a pioneering combination of plant extracts capable of protecting the skin from the accelerated-ageing effects of all indoor and outdoor air pollution but most significantly, the effects of Artificial Electromagnetic Waves." Apparently the British government didn't take too kindly to the marketing of the product.
Not a tech one, but very similar to the one you just described: There is a company called "World Reserve Monetary Exchange" which advertises in major newspapers like USA Today. They trick you into buying normal, non-collector-quality presidential dollar coins, which you can get at the bank, for ridiculous prices.
For a while, they were offering "free" presidential dollars, where they were only "free" if you bought the expensive case, and they wouldn't give you the coins without the case.
Recently they've been marketing back-dated state quarters, which they sell in rolls (these rolls, you can say, are "proprietary", since they're not normal bank coin rolls), also at ridiculous prices. They market them as "These coins are so valuable, and they stopped making them, so buy some now!" except that they are the same state quarters that circulate in our pockets every day, NOT proof or otherwise collector-oriented coins.
Yep, there's a sucker born every minute...
They aren't "much simpler". An ATSC tuner is a very complex device. Only recently have chipsets with good performance and low cost become available.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Once the tree dies, its carbon goes right back into the air.
Is spontaneous combustion a big problem for trees in you area?
Living on the central coast of California, lately the answer to that is sadly yes.
...that you can 'subscribe to'(for money) to get links to tech stories earlier than the non-subscribers. Yes, paying for links to other stories, earlier than anyone else would see it.
Like really, who the heck would pay for THAT? :)
Broken window fallacy, look it up
Sam ty sig.
It is really sad that we have come to the point that people don't consider it a scam when a product that is advertised as "Free" costs over $90.
The scam so nice they remarketed it twice! These handy dandy foot pads, using an "Ancient Japanese Secret", drain the toxins from your feet in exactly the same way a tree's toxins flow out through their roots (?!?). How do you know it works? You adhere a pad to each foot, and wear it while you sleep, and lo and behold, it's a different color when you wake up in the morning! Thanks to a little iron oxide in the pads reacting to the sweat from your feet.
https://www.buykinoki.com/
That's pretty much it, and plenty of suckers have bought into it.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
You shouldn't say things this funny near an airport.
My use of Vista is limited to some quick experience with a collegue's laptop, but it is clear to me that it is pretty rough around the edges. Case in point, plug in a flash drive, copy a (very small) file on, select remove drive, it says the drive is in use. Wait 10 seconds, file still in use. I understand the issues with FAT drives and delayed writes, however XP does not show the same issues for similar sized files.
meh
Then, he put in a driver CD to enable bluetooth functionality. It was absurd! Why crack the box open at all? My guess was to rationalize an obscene price by making a simple driver install an illusion of a "ZOMG hardware surgery performed by a engineer".
He would have to check if there was any hardware to install drivers for now wouldn't he?
Since you probably didn't bother to check if the price was reasonable either, nor if that which he needed to remove obstructed the slot he needed to stick the bluetooth card in, i'm giving him the benefit of the doubt.
Show a man some news, distract him for an hour. Show a man some mod points, distract him for the rest of his life.
Sarcasm and/or Joke Buy a sense of humor. You can probably find one on ebay 4ch33p.
There's always Linux for compute-intensive jobs, however.
Well, I'm running Ubuntu Hardon at home where it is mainly used by my wife for browsing purposes. I reasoned that for browsing the web you don't need more than the AMD 3200+ 1gb I put in there.
Strangely it manages to get completely swamped with talking to my wireless router when I take it far enough away from it.
I confess that I probably managed to screw with it and I should just do a clean install like I used to to with windows; it is just some anecdotal evidence to the point that you can slow down any box running any OS.
Show a man some news, distract him for an hour. Show a man some mod points, distract him for the rest of his life.
Uh, perhaps the bluetooth card was already installed. Suppose their customer(my employer at the time) decided to add bluetooth functionality afterward. And, if the blob was obstructing the slot as you suggested, then why would a bluetooth slot be purposely obstructed? That's still shady(though not at all surprising).
First mentioned in Space Quest 5, where you had to drink it while travelling in the desert, now available in stores. See the website to purchase.
The local summer carnival type thing started up this weekend. Inside they have dozens of booths of "as seen on TV" type products. Guys demo'ing knives, you name it.
Anyway, one of the products is the latest in the detox snakeoil business. The funny part was their sign: "Detox is the latest Buzz Word!".
They were seriously advertising something as a fad, and claiming that "buzzword" had a positive connotation. I was completely floored.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I don't avoid extended warranties because I figure I'll just fix things myself and save money that way.
I avoid them because in the 10+ years I've seen them for sale, not a single electronic anything I've bought has needed one. Not one. Every single electronic device I've owned in that time has either failed within the first year or so (manufacturer's warranty), or well after any extended warranty would have gone for. Or is still working, many years later.
That's 3 TVs, 2 DVD players, a home theatre system, 3 laptops, enough desktop PC parts to build 10 or 12 systems, 3 MP3 players, 2 GPS units, 4 video game consoles, and 3 digital cameras, just off the top of my head. The extended warranty on all these would have ended up costing me thousands of dollars. Much better to just save all that money, and in the once-in-a-blue-moon event that something does break, buy a new one.
Maybe I'm just phenomenally lucky, or maybe I just take care of my stuff. I don't know, but I'm astounded that anyone would ever buy an extended warranty. Maybe for a person who only ever buys one thing a decade...
Consumer electronics just aren't that fragile.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
That makes about as much sense as a church selling sin credits to stop people from sinning.
If you're going broke due to having to pay for all those sins/carbon emissions, the sensible man/business would likely start looking for ways to cut back on it.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Canals use locks or boat lifts or inclined planes to move boats through the canals.
Yes it will be slower to move the boats than the trucks, and yes we would have to use more land to make the canals, but it is a small price to pay compared to the higher price if we continue to burn fossil fuels like there is no tomorrow.
We could use wind sails to move boats, but only if the wind blows in the right direction. Possible we could adapt wind turbines to boats instead of sails to power an engine, and use solar cells when the sun is shining. If not for moving the boat, then for refrigeration power for food so it does not spoil on a slow moving boat. With the right engineering cooling food might not use as much power as moving the boat if the refrigeration unit is modern technology. You could also put in stationary bikes and pay someone to peddle them to provide power if the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine. I am sure with capacitors and batteries to hold charge people can peddle for 15 minutes, take a 15 minute break, let someone else peddle, etc. It would be good exercise.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I guess you don't understand how a business works.
When it gets higher taxes it passes the costs on to the consumer.
For example if XYZ Corp makes widgets, and it costs $1 to make a widget and they sell it for $2, with a $1 profit and $1 in expenses, but then the government decides that widgets are bad and puts a $5 sin tax for each widget, then XYZ Corp changes prices to $7 a widget to cover the $5 tax, and after deducting $5 for the tax, and $1 for their expenses, they are still left with a $1 profit. Does XYZ Corp get harmed, or does the consumer get harmed instead? With that in mind carbon credits and global warming is being used as a bat to hit poor people with, and I guess you just don't care how many lives are going to get ruined or how many people will die or lose their homes as a result, as long as the people and companies selling carbon credits get really really wealthy in this Enron engineered scam of the century. But then it has always been about the money, rather than helping out the poor and underprivileged on both the left and right side of the political compass?
It don't work for cigarettes either, governments keep raising that sin tax on cigarettes to try and get people to quit smoking so they can be healthier and not die of cancer, but smokers still buy cigarettes even if the price of cigarettes has gone insanely high.
You just cannot throw money at a problem and hope it goes away, that never works. You have to actually solve a problem to make it go away. You also cannot just willy nilly tax things and think that people will accept the higher taxes and not rebel in some way, how did you think the USA got started in the first place? Taxes where way too high, so they protested by throwing tea into Boston harbor. King George the III thought he could control the English colonies by raising taxes on them for certain items, if it didn't work back then, what makes you think it will work in the future?
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Someone, somewhere paid $25 dollars for a solar powered clothes drier: 10 feet of rope.
(If so, why haven't I died yet?)
There water is so pure that it cures diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis.
(So, this water can reach my brain???) Their purifying machine even unclogged sewage.
(Haven't heard about this on the news...)
They even said the secret is that the bonding angle is at a perfect 104 degree angle compared to other water.
(FYI, that is the normal angle...)
Also, they say don't listen to the doctors or other people because they are JEALOUS
(OK, so, how jealous are they over your water...?)
I read the ad because I was just bored... :)
I think big cities are partially to blame, everything they need has to be transported in to them, nothing actually comes from big cities that much, stuff comes from the countryside and the outskirts mostly. Big cities main export is governmental BS and what passes as "culture"..like gangstah rap! And also because of the corporate practice, a carryover from when it was manadatory before electronics was developed and communications became easy, of having central command giant ego office towers that force people to commute to them when all they do more or less is electronic office work that can be done at home. Forget efficient commuting using mass transit, that is still wasteful; as all get out, no different from driving SUVs around, because a ton of it is *not needed*, it is done, but it isn't needed. Just eliminate commuting all together whenever possible. This is the digital age, why are people still "going to the office" like it is the Dicksonian ages with quill pens, to stare at a computer screen and mash the print button? that's crazy stuff now, just mega silly. Collaboration can be done over the net. Eliminate the entire middleman as much as possible of moving people instead of moving electrons, then people can stay home, and we won't need to waste as much resources keeping those giant buildings up, or even constructing them in the first place. Just the sheer *waste* building those looming office towers is appalling. And cities screw up nature, no place for rainwater to soak in, Most trees that are there struggle, the only nature you see is ghetto rabbits and skyrats mostly, they trap heat and poisonous pollution gases and so on and screw up the weather downwind from where they are. Personally, I wouldn't raise a kid inside big cities now, I think it is borderline abuse just from the pollution they soak in 24/7 while their brains and bodies are developing.. We probably wouldn't even be having a fuel crisis right now if as many people who could work at home just did so. I think a lot of these pro giant cities people just have never thought it through all the way, they skip the bad parts of it, gloss over it. big cities came about from the necessity of face to face with trade and transportation way back in ye olden days, a lot of them are on the old river routes and ocean ports, but now...no need for all that face to face all the time, they exist from *inertia*. People went to the suburbs en masse when they could because they wanted to, they wanted out of the big cities, a lot of humans actually need some green around them, and then you *do* have space for a decent garden and a yard where the kids and dogs can play safely.
As to space for food, urban guerrila gardening, on wasted public lands and over grown weedy unkempt lots, rooftop gardening, etc, are all viable. There's a huge movement in cuba now to do mass scale urban gardening and it is actually working out quite well. You don't need a ton of space per person, a 10 foot by 10 foot square in total size will give a lot of food during the season. Heck, I once went nuts in a second floor apartment I had that had a few sunny windows and one little sunroom on the south side, at one time I had over 200 houseplants in there, including a lot of veggies (no pot though..). I even had a baby apple tree growing in there and some sunflowers that reached to the ceiling that had peas and cucumbers climbing them. It worked OK as a daily small salad provider. Oh ya, a couple rose bushes! That made that apt smell pretty nice all the time. On the cheap and small all you need is a 5 gallon plastic bucket or two, a bag of dirt from the garden center, and a sunny window. Throw a tomato and a pepper plant in there, done, healthy snacks. I've kept the same tomatoe plants growing for years before inside apartments, I mean, ya, your traditional ferns are cool, but why not some tomatoes or something else you like? the colored lettuces are all nice and grow like crazy. spinach is easy, radishes are fast and throw a lot of green around the room. Big fun, cheap eats, you are paying the rents anyway, might as well get a little payback from the windows!
Natural decomposition via bacteria, fungi, cows, whatever you want to mention releases almost all the trapped carbon back into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide(at best) or methane (which has a GWP of about 40tCO2/t). You can tell that this is an important effect because the ground is not entirely coal.
I bet cows burn especially easy because of all the methane.
Fnord.
You clearly don't understand what the purpose of carbon credits is and how they work.
Yes, regulation in any industry is likely to raise the price paid by consumers. But in this case it is a necessary evil if you want the benefit of having a cleaner environment.
the fact is that dirty coal is going to be cheaper than alternative energies for a VERY long time to come because we have so much of it. If our goal was to keep electricity as cheap as possible, we would burn coal and use hydro and nothing else. Hydro isn't actually as clean as you may think. The process kills off the lakes and estuaries that run from the dam.
Unfortunately (which you don't seem to realise) is that due to the bad effect on the environment we need to come up with some way that makes it more cost competitive to use cleaner technology and to eliminate the use of dirtier technologies.
Now, if you care for the environment you would want this to happen. But you can't just get rid of coal because we would be left with no electricity. The carbon credit scheme balances out the effect on these produces by supplying a grant of credits that makes up for the reduction in competitiveness of their power plants. Power will now be more expensive for them to produce, making cleaner tech more appealing.
Enron came up with the idea, only with the desire to be the trading centre for these credits. Trading was the one thing Enron was actually good at.
In short, if you care for the environment you won't mind paying more for electricity. If you don't then rebel your heart out. The parent to your comment was correct, you made yourself look foolish with lack of information.
WARNING: This sig does not contain a joke
This is my most recent favorite: http://www.fastspells.com/
It's a pretty standard web shopping cart system, where you buy spells. Not that you can perform, mind you. You're paying for them to do hoodoo. No proof or anything, but they do guarantee their work.
My favorite part is that they link out to a review site, ratethecaster.com, an independent site that says how good they are. Which just happens to be on the same IP.
BEST SCAM EVAR!!!
There really is "Dasani concentrate". "Dasani" is purified tap water to which some minerals have been added. The mineral mix is sold to bottlers by the Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta. This is the standard Coca-Cola business model; Coke works the same way.
"That's not right. Hell, that's not even wrong!"
Let's say we have a widget Q that is manufactured using substance F. F is deemed harmful to the environment, and it put under a cap-and-trade program. The price of F skyrockets. And yes, that cost is passed on the consumer.
But the process doesn't end there. Market forces are more subtle than that.
Assuming we have a market with competition, one competitor will figure out how to make a Q using less F, or no F at all. Since that competitor can sell his product at a lower cost, he will gain marketshare, forcing other companies to either make a similar change or be pushed out of the market.
In the worst case, if a Q can't be made with less F, then the high price of F will discourage consumption of Q. That's a good thing if F is bad for society.
I can't believe I have to explain this stuff.
And for what it's worth - the American colonies didn't rebel because taxes were too high. We rebelled because taxes were unfair and arbitrary, and George III was acting like a petty despot.
Also, you're wrong about cigarettes. In fact, demand for cigarettes decreases as price rises.
It seems to violate the law of thermodynamics in that CO2 molecules are destroyed somehow, and proves itself to be very unscientific.
I suspect you of trolling, as I'm not sure anybody could really be that retarded. But just in case:
Most carbon credits come from emitting less. Say you've got an industrial plant with a big furnace, one that emits X CO2 per year. Then you improve energy efficiency, so you're now emitting X/2 CO2. You can just be happy with your contribution to terraforming earth. Or you can sell your emissions reduction to somebody else who has a harder time reducing their CO2 emissions. They will have bought a carbon credit.
Another approach is sequestration, where you take the CO2 and get rid of it. Some of this does involve destroying CO2 molecules, which is perfectly scientific. Destroying mass is pretty hard, and destroying atoms isn't easy, either. But destroying molecules is so easy that I'm doing it right now. For sequestration, one might destroy CO2 while creating calcium carbonate.
If you want to be less publicly idiotic in the future, try Wikipedia before posting:
Parent post is +5, insightfully wrong.
The "free" digital TV box gimmick is not necessarily a scam. ... A scam, on the other hand, requires deception to secure an unfair or unlawful gain.
The deception is advertising as "free" something that costs money. If you have a coupon for a free cheeseburger, and they charged you $88, wouldn't you be displeased?
Stewart's law: it always costs more to get something "free" than to just buy it.
Hint: if they want you to pay for it, it isn't free.
If the widget with the 5 year warranty is $88, and you can't get the one without the other, no part of it is free; there's an $88 minimum per transaction.
This is a very common kind of scam, even used by come companies that are otherwise considered reputable, but it's always a scam.
I find that pretty hard to accept. Sure, the chip may be complex, but certainly also is a DVD player, which contains a precision optics electro-mechanical device, as well as sharing many things in common with a converter box. This isn't exactly brand new technology, one local station here has been broadcasting in HD since 1966. If the industry has been dragging their feet on producing devices (and it certainly seems that they have been), that just might be because they saw these $40 coupons as a government goldmine and lobbied for them and waited for them. And as to chips, you know what they say, the first one costs a million bucks, the next ones are a penny a piece. I really doubt that there is much that you could say to convince me that a DTV converter should cost over twice what a DVD player costs, or that there are really free market forces at work here. As soon as the coupons are no longer available, the price will drop fast. Perhaps delayed a little because of whatever inventory is in the supply chain that the retailers have already overpaid for and will try to pass that inflated price along to the consumer, but it will be kept artificially inflated by the coupon program until then.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Use barges powered by engines that use hydrogen for fuel. Make hydrogen from wind power and water. While hydrogen is a joke for cars (batteries will rule the day there), it makes sense for high energy density applications (boats, aircraft, farming equipment like combines).
The receiver circuits are much more complex than the transmitter circuits. It has to do decoding for error correction, which is always harder than doing the encoding. The major problem with ATSC tuners has been handling multipath. A great deal of effort and money has been spent on improving the performance of the tuners under conditions of severe multipath. That's why the latest tuner designs work so much better than those designed just a few years ago. Besides R&D and design costs, the transistor count has increased. Despite that, the end user cost has greatly decreased. The first ATSC tuners were more than $1000 and their performance was terrible on real-world signals. The previous generation of boxes cost more than $200. The current boxes are a bargain and a good example of how mass production can drive down costs and prices.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The reason a ton is useful is that people know how fast ice melts. They know (roughly) that a ton is a heckuva lot of ice. When you tell them your A/C is a "2 ton unit" they can then get an idea of how much energy is used - a lot more than just mentioning a figure in kW.
I have NO IDEA on how fast ice melt, and I am a physicist (*). I bet whatever you want the average joe on the street won't have an idea either. As for knowing a ton is huge... Well no shit sherlock. Does that help your average A/C unit buyer ? Not at all. On the other hand, 3.5 kwh means I know how much I will pay on my next electricity bill (which are not counted in tons). And that tell 95% of the world how much energy will the A/C unit consume. And I bet your average US consumer would be more happier knowing one A/C consume 3.5 kwh than 2 tons for the same aforementioned reason. Combine that with a clearly defined efficiency and you are all set.
(*) but I can talk to your hours long about boring forbidden transition n-sigma*
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
A listing on ebay lists High Quality 24K Gold Electro-Plated Connectors, High Purity OFC Copper for High Transmission Speed, Anti-Interference Ferrite Filters as well as Anti-Noise, High Density Shields & Ability to Restore the Signal, as some of the features of there TOS Link optical audio cable. I found this one very funny.. http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/2m-Gold-TOSLink-Optical-Cable-TOS-Link-Lead-XBox-PS2_W0QQitemZ290243153497QQcmdZViewItem?hash=item290243153497&_trkparms=72%3A12%7C39%3A1%7C65%3A12&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14
In the troll's defense, XP does suffer from disk fragmentation. In the past I've either moved to 64KB clusters or ran JKDefrag nightly. Is Vista better in this regard?
de centralized power in the form of billions of solar PV modules could help eliminate any new huge transmission lines being needed. My theory is, if it's a roof sitting in the hot sun, it needs to be covered with solar panels. And the government wouldn't need to do much more than a few lines on a new law authorizing 100% tax credits up to..some level determined, around 20 thousand amortized over five tax seasons would be sufficient I guess. Not partial credits or deductions, full credits. The slack in taxes there could be made up elsewhere as new manufacturing and service industries grew, with the end game result of a lot more energy independence. Last place we lived as caretakers was mostly all solar powered, a 29 thou installation did the bulk of the circuits for the owners three story mini-mansion. I've lived with it and seen it work, awesome. That and also use the same form of credits for just more insulation, and mandate better energy efficiency standards for new construction and deed/title transfers.
As to cities, to be clear, I am not saying tear them all down, but help people who can and want to not be forced to live there or be forced to commute there to have a viable option or two. I have no idea what the real figures might be, but there simply has to be millions of jobs that can be done at home that are currently being done by commuters to the cities.
One of the things that is just driving me up the wall in nearly all of the advertisements about HD television is how it is so much better and improved over analog television.
I'll agree that in a rough technical sense there are more pixels than analog television, and under "ideal conditions" perhaps you get a better quality viewing experience. But I don't buy for a minute that analogy television is any better or worse than digital television.... it is only different.
For myself, I would rather have some occasional snow in my viewing picture and some background noise in the sound channel than having some awful MPEG artifacting, pops, clicks, chirps, and other audio artifacts that happen when digital signals start to seriously degrade. Or worse, right in the middle of some discussion you are seeing on the television the frame suddenly freezes or is jerky and only updates every 10 seconds or so with the audio dropping out entirely.
From my own experience, HD television is giving me far worse "quality of service" than analog television ever did... and rural areas are getting shafted even worse than in the days of analog television as well. Reception is worse, and dead spots that had problems with analog television are going to be even worse still.
The only thing that HD television has going for it right now is that some video engineers did have a chance to review the new standards with quite a bit of experience under their belts when it was developed. Analog television had decades of backward compatibility to earlier standards to work with including having to support the older B&W devices.
In spite of all of the advertisements about digital television, there are going to be a whole bunch of people pissed at the government, television stations, and others when the analog transmitters go off the air.
Well, I don't want civil war, but I sure would like to see a more realistic and equitable split in the worth of this or that area of the nation and between urban and rural. I really don't think a lot of pure urbanites understand how their lives and lifestyles are so very much tied to a healthy and robust rural economy and infrastructure, so they dismiss it out of hand.
As for myself, I saw the upcoming economic collapse starting around the late 90s so I moved back rural. When I was a kid I listened and paid attention to my older relatives stories about the great depression, and when I saw all the same clues they mentioned that were the prelude to that, I knew the same result would be coming. And it isn't really rocket surgery, it's just seeing trends, reading and understanding some history, noting that human behavior isn't all that different from thousands of yearts ago, and having the ability to work simple sums.. the economy isn't even near done collapsing, and that's reality, I won't even put it in the speculation category anymore. The monetary supply is inflated WAY beyond any sort of rationality, and they have pushed magic beans paper financial products into the realms of clinical insanity. There is no possible way to avoid collapse, none, it doesn't exist, it isn't even theoretically possible at this point..
Being poor and broke in the cities is an absolute no win situation, at least in the rural areas you have some immediate and onsite fallback positions for life's necessities. And all these highly paid folks now in the cities will be almost helpless to do anything about their situations once those big checks stop coming in, or even if they hang onto their jobs, a really big *if* right now, that money simply won't be enough to cover the basics, although their contractual debts will remain intact.
Superfetch is like early speech recognition software (and some current gen stuff). At the beginning, it makes a lot of mistakes and generally sucks. As you use it more, it learns your patterns. It needs to be trained, and over time the miss rate goes down drastically, and it really does improve things. You can also improve the sluggishness in Vista by going into the performance settings and letting it auto-tune itself to your computer's capabilities.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
The deception is advertising as "free" something that costs money. If you have a coupon for a free cheeseburger, and they charged you $88, wouldn't you be displeased?
If that wasn't made clear before I entered into a contract, yes, but that is not the likely case here. If they took your details, gave you the box, then deceived you by charging for the warranty later on, that's a scam. If you know about the warranty before entering into contract, it's not a scam.
Your argument does not make logical sense, even though it successfully appeals to the emotions. If, say, Toyota offered you a free car, but you still had to pay for the registration, insurance, and so forth, does that mean the car is no longer "free"?
It depends how you view the purchase, whether holistically or in a logical sense based on the individual components of the transaction. You appear to be looking at the TV box transaction holistically, whereas I am just duly itemizing the cost of the various parts of the transaction. There is room for both arguments, and while only one is strictly logically correct, the other may be more pragmatic in scope.
I'll grant you that it's not high-tech and that it's crappy and deceptive to bill it as such, but unless you're willing to work inside your refrigerator, it's a good low-tech way to transfer some of that cold to your workspace. I bought something similar from ThinkGeek a couple years ago (it wasn't billed as cutting-edge technology there, of course), and it did help cut the heat a bit during the stretch when we lived in a basement apartment without air conditioning (my office routinely got to 85 degrees F, summer AND winter). It wasn't the arctic blast I would have liked, but it was colder than a regular fan of the same size.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Very recently. Notice the linksynergy links that must be used, or it won't work.
Read my blog: HansMast.com
I do repair and upgrade on weekends. And last week I was training a guy who asked me the same question -- expect it was about "gum" stuck further side of the sata drive. I didn't answer him for the same obvious reason I will not be answering you.
Even veals have more autonomy!
This laptop came with Windows Vista Preminum -- I downgrade to XP, and dual boot with Kubuntu. I really didn't like Vista -- too many "demo" software, other crazy stuff. I just couldn't take it. Why can't they give us clean OS? I know the answer but it's worth asking.
Even veals have more autonomy!
The laws of thermodynamics prevent a car from ever running on JUST water. Nevertheless, a wide range of intelligent people seem to be falling for all the reports of this being done.
All the water powered tech I've seen has always required another expendable component (usually either electricity or a chemical reaction) to work. This part of the equation is NOT free.
Well.. the important question in breaking down the pricing is whether or not the fees are separable.
You can buy a car without paying for registration OR insurance. But you can't drive it on public roads. Further, those fees don't even go to Toyota. Their part of the transaction is done when then give you the car. So in that case, the holistic approach isn't warranted.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
My use of Vista is limited to some quick experience with a collegue's laptop, but it is clear to me that it is pretty rough around the edges. Case in point, plug in a flash drive, copy a (very small) file on, select remove drive, it says the drive is in use. Wait 10 seconds, file still in use. I understand the issues with FAT drives and delayed writes, however XP does not show the same issues for similar sized files.
FAT doesn't support delayed writes like NTFS does, so all writes to a FAT drive are immediate. You can just pull a USB flash drive out and walk away once the little light stops flashing. Selecting "remove drive" is asking Vista to perform an unnecessary step. There is no problem here--- unless you're formatting a flash drive with NTFS, in which case that's your problem.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Internet-ready modems.
Jory
I don't think this will be like the first great depression. People won't put up with mass moving to the camps or to government camp/work projects like they did before as the last dregs of their wealth gets confiscated and put into already wealthy people's hands. They did that once, a second time..not so sure it will fly this go around, we are more sophisticated now and more paranoid of motives and more able to get information. It's not just a small handful of newspaper owners and radio station owners they have to compromise, like they did last time to push propaganda.. They are already panicking (as well they should) over a paltry few million looming bankruptcies and houses being repoed, tens of millions in a borked economy with no way out and full complete despair facing people, living out on the street..not gonna happen. They've cooked the books on phony low-ball numbers inflation and phony unemployment stats as much as they can, they are running out of lies and excuses to cover for their sheer greed and arrogance ands stupidity. And the US was getting *very* close to mass internal revolt (against predatory capitalism mostly) by the time their bankers ww2 was run up the flagpole and used as a mass distraction. When you have the same big banks and the same multinationals and the same martini swilling cocktail partying at the yacht club people all involved in profiting from a war, it wasn't an accident, it was done on purpose.
We have way too many ways to get information out now, and people will be noticing who's fault is what. This last administration has just completely destroyed any sort of trust that the people have in government for telling the truth, the executive branch or congress, lowest approval ratings ever, lowest trust ratings ever, etc., they realize now it is all mostly an illusion to perpetuate the top 1% wealthy people at the expense of everyone else. I know there are still a lot of grassroots activists who cling to the outmoded belief that "this time" their pet big R or D candidate, "once they get in", will change things for the better, but those people come with a full belly of cult brand koolaid, they'll be the last ones to really see what is going on. Everyone else, who isn't a full time cult political party activist, is already starting to see it. and I guess..just a gues... you have to be around for a lot of election cycles to realize that past a pure intellectual level. You have to have lived it to see that D or R it doesn't make a bit oif difference, they are just two criminal political gangs in a jobs and skimming operation, they share the spils of owning government. No one who isn't in on and it and isn't a full member and adherent of that "system" ever makes it into the top ranks. Heck, I used to know before he died a *very* high ranking d party leader, I will not identify him, but he would get a little gassed on scotch and start laughing about it to me when we had informal talks/conversations, how much they sucker in the rubes to stay powerful. The term is "useful idiots" and it applies to both parties.
I think the government using their flag waving hessians along with their black suited economic spokesmodels murmuring soothing words will try a few more various schemes to both cork up dissent and also to try and "fix" the economy, but will not succeed, because not only have they screwed over their own people, they took a lot of powerful foreigners to the cleaners as well, and those folks are pissed off now and trying to slide away for support of the US and the fedbuck as much as possible in a loss-cutting way..
I worry the most about a rather involved and destructive false flag operation though, and I wouldn't put it past them for one second to not already have such plans sitting on the shelf, or to implement them when they deem it necessary.
That makes about as much sense as a church selling sin credits to stop people from sinning.
In the modern world, we call them sin taxes. E.g., the punitive tax on cigarettes to get people to stop smoking. They work quite well. One alternative to a cap-and-trade system is a carbon tax.
Did you know that the whole cap and trade system of carbon credits was invented by Enron?
Do you have the slightest bit of proof of that? As far as I can tell it goes back to a couple of Harvard economists, Roberts and Spence, in a mid-70s paper.
When it gets higher taxes it passes the costs on to the consumer.
Maybe, maybe not. If they do, then the consumer will change their behavior. As we are seeing right now with the price of oil.
It don't work for cigarettes either, governments keep raising that sin tax on cigarettes to try and get people to quit smoking so they can be healthier and not die of cancer, but smokers still buy cigarettes even if the price of cigarettes has gone insanely high.
You are utterly wrong. Wrong to the point of negligence. Could you look something up now and then before you run your mouth?
I went to Google and typed in cigarette tax smoking rate study. In about 3 seconds, I found an easy-to-read newspaper article about a study that shows that cigarette taxes are very effective in reducing smoking. Carbon taxes would be similarly effective, but cap-and-trade systems seem to be an adequate substitute.
I'm in the same position - my old laptop started pouring smoke, and since I'm in the middle of finishing up my doctoral thesis I needed to replace it pronto, which meant an off-the-shelf with Vista installed. I was really wary, but actually find I like it. I would have been annoyed to have to install it on my old and vastly slower machine, but since this one has much better hardware and runs much faster than XP did on the other, I'm quite happy.
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
Well, not a scam "per se" but they claim to work, and all I've tried do not. Like Xm radio (any newer one-not the old ones that actually work well) or my new TomTom 930 gps. I know the FCC has crippled these devices so it isn't the companies fault but the fact remains, they all claim they have wireless fm. They do, but only if you live 200 miles from a metropolis and put torroids on the power AND have a place to mount less than 4 feet from your antenna. They lead you to believe that you just plug it in, tune to a free station, and you have great hands free phone, xm, mp3, whatever. Not True.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
So for the people that cannot afford alternatives to fossil fuels like those who are sick or on disability or poor and living on a fixed income, we just let die off and don't even bother to help them afford greener technology. Better to just let 3 billion people world wide die off because they cannot afford to buy food or live because they are poor. Basically you claim it is ethical and moral to do so, because it saves the planet? The ends justify the means? Anyone who cares about human lives of poor people like me are foolish?
So then you support 100% the upcoming holocaust because you care about the environment more than human lives?
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Assuming of course that entropy does not exist, and creating Q provides more energy or as much energy that it uses to create Q in the first place out of alternative matter and/or energy to power the machines to manufacture Q, so that F isn't needed anymore.
The article on the American revolution cites history books that say "The issues with the colonists were both that the taxes were high and that the colonies had no representation in the Parliament which passed the taxes."
and
"The phrase 'No taxation without representation' became popular in many American circles. London argued that the Americans were represented 'virtually'; but most Americans rejected the theory that men in London, who knew nothing about their needs and conditions, could represent them."
Americans are already claiming that representatives in government know nothing about their needs and conditions and that gas and oil are already too high. Since for the past 30 years both Democrats and Republicans promised to make the USA energy independent and at least find an alternative to oil, citizens are getting skeptical and as bankruptcies are on the rise and mortgages are not being paid off, how do you think they will react to even higher gas and oil prices due to carbon credits and cap and trade? If oil alternatives cost less than $2 gallon to drive a truck or car, things will be alright. But can you prove to me that oil alternatives that do not emit CO2 will cost $2/gallon or cheaper and be in abundant supply so poor people need not use gas and oil anymore?
Oh yeah, cigarette sales are down because global deaths from cigarette smoking are up and consumers are dying off faster of cancer than being saved from quitting smoking. When the consumer dies, yeah demand will go down. That was my point.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Rather than buying a costly extended warranty, I generally do some research for smaller shops that would be willing to do repairs on a "greater than 1 year old but less than 3 year old" laptop.
In my area, I've found that the small ones come and go, but at any given time, you can find at least ONE reputable computer tech. working out of his home or small business who sources parts from eBay, and does repairs inexpensively on Apple or other notebooks.
(EG. Yes, Apple will charge and arm and a leg for a logic board. But there's always somebody out there who just dropped their same model of laptop, smashed the screen, and decided they'd rather just sell it for parts value than get it repaired. Voila, there's the logic board you need for well under $100 in most cases!)
If the laptop in question is 3+ years old, it's almost a sure bet you're best off just replacing it when it breaks. (Faster, better stuff is out there by then.)
Is spontaneous combustion a big problem for trees in you area?
Well, SoCal seems to be suffering an outbreak lately.
We are the 198 proof..
The subject says it all.
We are the 198 proof..
Once the tree dies, its carbon goes right back into the air.
Funny, I haven't seen many evaporating trees, lately. Generally, you have to burn it or have something eat it in order to turn cellulose into CO2.
My bad, I meant write behind caching, which is the reason you you select safely remove hardware (or unmount on linux).
In the end that is beside the point. If this is an unneccessary step, Vista should not fail and say the drive cannot be unmounted. If it is a neccessary step, vista should not fail.
Short version: Vista -> Fail.
meh
If it is getting swamped when you get further away from the wireless router, it is more likely that the signal is either getting a lot of distortion and interference or it is getting too week and the NIC or Router is downgrading the wireless speeds to improve the integrity of the connection.
Using a different computer with a different wireless card isn't a valid test either. It needs to be checked with the NIC in use that is getting swamped. I would check your signal out before blasting an install. It is likely that the problem has nothing to do with the install or it is because of an obscure setting in the radio interface of either your router or wireless NIC.
This humor is way to subtle for the average moderating audience. Know though that it is appreciated none the less. Keep up the good work.
Show a man some news, distract him for an hour. Show a man some mod points, distract him for the rest of his life.
Uh, perhaps the bluetooth card was already installed. Suppose their customer(my employer at the time) decided to add bluetooth functionality afterward. And, if the blob was obstructing the slot as you suggested, then why would a bluetooth slot be purposely obstructed? That's still shady(though not at all surprising).
Yes, maybe he could have just installed the driver and the guy was a moron for opening up the box at all.
Show a man some news, distract him for an hour. Show a man some mod points, distract him for the rest of his life.
Not at all, I was just explaining how they work.
If you want to treat it entirely from an unbiased viewpoint, try and form your opinion on how much you think a major worldwide environmental disaster would cost (in dollars and lives) versus giving up a little bit now.
I'm not trying to convince you either way, as I'm actually undecided. I don't have enough information to accurately judge whether we even make a difference to our environment. It seems that a lot of people believe that there is enough info out there. Even if it doesn't turn out to be true, it seems to me that it is a pretty cheap insurance policy...some governments are even trying to reimburse consumers for the extra cost. The Australian government is doing this.
All I'm saying is that carbon credits are a pretty good mix of capitalist values and green values. If most people say that they want to save the environment, then this is probably going to be the way forward. If you don't believe it, get out there and petition!
WARNING: This sig does not contain a joke
Thanks for the tips. We're going completely off topic, but anyway.
fwiw I've tried again with the pc 3 meters away from the router with clear line of sight. The speed is still well below 0.5mbit. I have tested the same nic before on windows: speeds were fine. I'm pretty sure it is either the linux driver or my configuration thereof.
I should really try with ndiswrapper before doing a clean install. But getting the inf and sys files out of the exe is a whole new part of hell (yes I have tried wine). Or maybe I should just build a cantenna. Or an antenna on a really long wire...
Show a man some news, distract him for an hour. Show a man some mod points, distract him for the rest of his life.
You might be on the right track. There is likely either a power setting where the card isn't turned up (radio controls) or the driver can't properly control it.
Maybe going with the NDIS wrapper is the way to go. To find the files, try searching driver guide or some windows driver sites (look for the free ones) for the driver files. sometimes, it is just the INF and SYS files. Alternatively, If you have a windows install somewhere, you can look for InstalRite or some other tools. Here is some suggestions I came across that might be helpful. I like the orca suggestion if the windows installer uses an MSI installer. I have used the InstalRight in the past with some success but it basically indexes the file and registry system them diffs the before and after to show the changes. It starts to take quite a lot of space up after a while.
I saw that we were going off topic. You sound like you got a good grasp on it and what I offered was of little use to you, but someone else will end up google'ing for similar symptoms and perhaps end up one step closer to their answer. Anyways, good luck with it.
I used beta Vista x64... the lovely operating system used up about 1.2GiB of RAM at idle... no, not system cache. Since I only had 1GiB of RAM, even when I started notepad.exe the system choked and sputtered from massive page thrashing. The product was so unusable that I was basically not working for a whole week while I was waiting for the extra RAM to arrive. Once the RAM arrived, Vista x64 actually ran fairly reasonably... until about a month later or so, and started sucking so bad that I simply went back to Server 2003 SP2 (which is a far better product IMHO).
I gave Vista quite the fair shake, and the initial release sucked; period. When SP1 started to be offered, I actually got a hold of that and put it on my 32-bit machine at work, and it actually ran fairly well, and I told people that honestly, I was happy that Vista stopped sucking so back with SP1, and if they didn't have Vista yet, then to wait for SP1 to come out. I tried to use Server 2008 on my Itanium system, however it was such an old system that Server 2008 didn't support it. :( sad panda.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Why would you want to pay for a warranty on a product which is free? If it breaks, you just get another one. In fact, why not go get twenty of these things at the outset Just In Case?
GP is actually correct. Cigarette consumption is regarded as relatively inelastic, with governments receiving vastly more income from cigarette sales by raising taxes. Demand elasticity for cigarettes hovers around -0.4 for a 10% increase in tax there is around a 4% reduction in smoking. This means that taxes are an excellent way for the government to keep it's snout in the trough and still appear to be doing something to combat the issue.
For a less sparkly, magical, utopian view check some <a href="http://www.choicesmagazine.org/2004-1/2004-1-09.htm">alternate sources</a>
Barbara Felden claims prior art on the flip phone, sues Motorola, Nokia.
I use nod32 which is incredibly lightweight and I only run spyware checking apps once a month, so I doubt any of that has much of an effect on performance, plus I'm running the same apps on my vista laptop.
or a 10% increase in tax there is around a 4% reduction in smoking.
Well, that's not quite correct; it would be based on the whole cigarette price, not just the amount of tax. Still, those numbers seem to be in line with the ones I linked to. Note that governments have been doing 100-600% increases in cigarette taxes, so the declines in smoking seem to be in line with the substantial cost increases. Thus, the tactic of taxes is, as I said, effective.
And that's with something that is physically addictive, notoriously hard to quit. Carbon taxes should be much more effective, because nobody actually cares about emitting CO2 for its own sake; it's always a byproduct of what people actually want to do.