Yes, but that's created all sort of transportation and structural problem due to neither cars nor houses designed to be submerged in two feet of water.
I think from now on they've decided to go to the 'wear less clothing' concept.
For one thing, it doesn't make sense to use hydro power to pump the water back, so you need a coal burning plant to do so.
It doesn't make any sense to say that doesn't make any sense.
If you have a hydro plant, you don't need 'pumped hydro'. Instead of taking the electricity generated by it during the night, and using it to pump the water back, which obviously doesn't make sense thermodynamically, you just let less water through at night.
Pumped hydro is way of making other power sources have the same buffer that hydro has, by turning them into hydro. You don't need to do it to hydro, and if you have both a non-hydro plant and an actual 'filled by rain' hydro plant nearby, instead of building some system to refill the lake, it's more efficent to use the non-hydro plant to provide power at all times, and only let water out for peak power. (This is what Georgia Power does where I live.)
You're basically spot on, but you didn't state the obvious: There's no point in taking a nuclear power plant down, unless you're going to keep it offline for a decade or so. Not because of time required to start it up, but simply because it's not going to save you any fuel.
What we need to do is track down everyone who doesn't know this and kick them off slashdot.
Honestly, people. You see the tagline up there? 'News for Nerds'? Maybe you should get a little basic technical knowledge before posting a technical comment, like the fact that a hell of a lot of embedded systems uses Pentiums nowadays, and in fact that's basically the reason Intel still makes them. (They did the same thing with the 386 for a while.)
These embedded Pentiums are built using fairly current tech, you know, the tech that's getting the pathways as small as possible to reduce heat so you can run your P4 at 3.5Ghz? Except, of course, these chips are running at around 350Mhz instead, and hence use almost no power at all, or generate any heat, which means no CPU fan, or in fact any fans at all.(1) (Of course, a gigantic battery might need fans for other reasons.)
The advantages of this over other, lower-power solutions like ARM is that it's cheaper, they can take off-the shelf parts (The motherboards have PCI slots), the assemble programmers are easier to find, it's trivial to test the software on their own system, and they have modern memory protection. (Some custom embedded chips don't have MMUs.)
What the hell did you fools think this company was doing? Buying old Pentium computers and sticking them inside their stuff? No. They are using an embedded solution that happens to consist of chips that are decended from Pentiums.
1) Hell, some original Pentiums got along fine without CPU fans, just a big heatsink.
The materials, in a bathroom, by weight, is less than any car. And cars are made of mostly metal and plastic, which go through long journeys to get here, while a lot of a 'room' is wood, and there are lumber mills within a hundred miles of everywhere. I used to drive by one every day. It has a hell of a lot more impact to manufacture any car than any room. (At least, any room sans furnishing.)
And, again, rooms last much longer than cars. The median age of homes is probably 1970, whereas the median age of cars is probably 1990.
Wood to build the walls: Not mined, renewable resource.
Drywall: Gypsum is mined in, probably, Nova Scotia, where they have enough to last basically forever. In fact, they already have too many mines for the demand, and the existing mines will probably last decades before they have to move over a few miles and dig more. In fact, it's common all over the world, and basically impossible to run out of, it's just exposed in Nova Scotia. And as it's merely CaSO4, and we'll never run out of calcium or sulfur, we'll never run out of it.
Porcelain toilet, sink, glass door on tub, tiles, mirror: All composed of silicon dioxide, aka sand, aka, the surface of the earth.
Plastic tub, plastic pipes. Ah, you got me there. They're made out of oil...
...except, of course, a one-time purchase of plastic is nothing compared to getting just one mpg more in your car, which not only actually uses up more oil (Instead of putting it in a form it can be recycled from.), but introduces stuff into the air. And does it every single time you drive somewhere, instead of just using the equivilent of a tank of gas once every decade.
Hell, constantly driving around with two pounds of junk in your car, which everyone does, for a decade, alone uses more oil and generates more waste than an extra bathtub. Or accelerating rapidly instead of slowly.
And this isn't even mentioning the amount of waste we purchase and immediately throw away each day. Complaining about the materials used to make a room is inane, considering we get decades of use out of them.
And before you talk about energy in heating and cooling, like I said, the cost of that is directly related to where you choose to live and how modern your house is (and hence how little leakage there is), along with secondary concerns like what you keep the temperature at and how often you go in and out. The amount of empty space behind closed door is tertiary at best.
It reminds me of the people who say 'Turn off the water while you're brushing your teeth.'. Look, that might be important in Las Vegas, but I chose to actually live in a place with water. We pump it out of the ground, and we pump it back in, and can 'use' as much as we want. (By 'use', I mean 'move in a circle'. Obviously, putting junk in it would be different.) I'm wasting a tiny bit of electricity, and that's it. It probably costs more to watch 5 minutes of TV, or every time I open the fridge. (Which incidentally, I keep milk jugs full of water in if there is extra space, so all the cold doesn't fall out when I do that. That's as much to extend the lifetime of the fridge as to save electricity.)
Likewise, I have a house that's actually weather stripped, with correct ventilization in the attic, and I usually don't have to heat it more than 30 degrees or cool it more than 15, which I can do using the heat pump 99% of the time, because I don't live in the fucking artic wasteland they call North Dakota or even New England, or the desert they call Texas.
The size of a house is a pretend concern that people bring up because they are screwed up and think people should be poor, not out of any environmental concern. A LOT of 'environmentalism' is pretend concerns. Weather-protect your damn houses and buy somewhat fuel-efficient cars, and you're already doing fifty times better than people who don't do those thing but inanely recycle their newspapers and glass bottles.
What the hell does the number of bedrooms and bathrooms have to do with anything? Both of those have neligable impact on the enviroment.
And before anyone mentions 'heating and cooling the house', good insulation, bricks, less windows, and, hell, having a square house instead of a rectangular one, all have a lot more effect on your heating and cooling bill. Or just living in a place where the temperatures normally range from 95 to 35, instead of 75 to 10, so you're almost always heating off a heat pump instead of a heater coil.
Square footage of a house is almost completely irrelevant in the grand scheme of how much energy a house costs to run, and the idea that it's as important as the emissions and mpg of the car you drive is just pandering to the stereotype that enviromentalists are all poor.
And here's real food for thought: A good wat to reduce energy wastage is to have an airlock on a building. Normal houses do not have these. But big houses often do, called a foyer.
Hydroelectric is the only consistent 'alternate' source of power. And, of course, only a few places can handle those things. Luckily, where I live is one of them, both 'natural' hydroelectic and a giant human built-lake. (Lake Sidney Lanier in Northeast Georgia.)
And, of course, we also do some nuclear. In fact, Georgia Power is supposed building a new nuclear power plant within a decade. Yay!
Everyone who thinks their power can supplied with wind or solar power are deluding themselves. We simply do not have the storage ability. Solar's a nice option in hot enviroments for helping peak air conditioning usage, but that's about it.
That's nothing. Do you know our transportation system won't last for a hundred years? The current material roads are made out of barely last decades.
And while a nuclear waste leak might suck for people living near it, when the roads fail, which like I said, will happen in your lifetime, almost every single person in this country is going to starve to death.
Alternately, we could fucking maintain on things that, if they fail, kill us. Novel concept, I know.
Jesus Christ. What is it with the nuclear waste people? The odds we won't have a use for 'nuclear waste' in 100 years, thanks to breeder reactors and whatnot, is fairly slim, and then all the people who built concrete bunkers that would contain the waste for 100,000 years are going to look pretty damn stupid, especially if we can't safely break back into the things due to the threat of causing a leak.
Just built a layer below Fort Knox, put them in well designed barrels, and check them every few year.
No oil company owns, or owned, that patent, and it wasn't any better than existing-at-the-time fuel injection. Not just current ones, it wasn't any better than reasonably-designed EFI back then. (With the advent of real computer controlled EFIs, of course, it's completely pointless.)
It was not quashed because it was better, it died because it was solving a huge problem in the auto industry...that didn't exist anymore. Aka, the fact that mechanical control of fuel mixing was poor. No one needed or wanted a carburator that was more expensive and burned less fuel than the fuel injection system that car companies had just spent years developing. If it had been invented five years earlier, it might have caused less research into EFI and more into carburators, but it wasn't.
And, like I said, almost all this research has been due to emissions reduction, not increasing gas mileage. Cars lose huge amounts of energy within the engine and transfering that energy to the road. Burning 85% of the gas vs. 95% of the gas is almost completely meaningless, considering how craptacular everything else was in cars until the early 90s, when due to continually tightening enviromental guidelines they ran out of fixing stupid stuff like throwing gas out the exhaust and had to start fixing actual difficult problems like transmission efficency and coasting. (Luckly for them, at that point, it became much easier to alter internal setting in the car via computer based on what you were doing, which not only let the computer alter things in real time, but let them test in real time also.)
You can relate made-up stories that happened to other people all you want. There is not, and cannot be, any sort of magical carburator. The story just makes no sense. It is a physical fact that 97% of the gas is currently burned, and no engine built, oh, ten years after the invention of the internal combustion engine has ever burned less than 70%, so it is flatly impossible for any carburator to ever have even doubled fuel efficency, much less taken it from about 20 mpg to 200 mpg, like the story goes. It's akin to a magical noozle you put on the end of a garden hose to make to fill a swimming pool faster. There are plenty of ways to fill swimming pools fast, but you cannot solve that problem from that place, because that place is not the problem. It is, in fact, the other end and the size of the hose that's the problem. You cannot fix gas usage via the carburator. You cannot remove waste that is not there.
There are factually better transmission, the 'infinite' ones, that smoothly alter the gear ratio instead of 'switching gears'. Those cars get somewhat better gas mileage, but suck for cost and repair. (And hybrid cars where the engine always goes at one speed are probably going to obsolete both them and normal transmissions.) There are better engine designs, but not better and equally robust under the crappy conditions cars operate under. And you can always make the car lighter, but at some point it becomes unsafe(1) or you have to use expensive things like titanium. But you could probably built a non-hybrid, safe car that got 75 mpg right now. It wouldn't work in the winter, and it would cost 400,000 dollars, but you could do it.
And, of course, hybrid cars themselves, the probably biggest threat to gas usage. Huge increases in mpg, and the 'electical storage' industry is fairly new and has all sorts of exciting ideas. One of them will pan out, and we'll get even more huge savings of gas. Might be fuel cells, might be better conventional batteries, might be something we've never thought of, or even thought of and dismissed like flywheels. But, like what happened engines once we got the ability to simulate them on computer, I fully expect them to half the electrical lossage in hybrids within the decade.
Oddly enough, the oil industry hasn't stepped in and stopped any of those things, despite all current hybrid cars being patented and produced under just a few patents, which they could trivi
If someone owns the patent to something, YOU CANNOT use it.
Until it expires, you dumbass. Patents last about 20 years. If you had bothered to what I was talking about, this all happened 60 years ago, this supposed magical carburator.
Which, incidentally, would be operating in violation of laws of engine efficieny if you could put it on a 1940s car and get 200 miles to the gallon like the inventor claimed. Someday, cars might get that much, but via incrimental improvements to weight and power lossage, and tech like regerative breaking. We will never invent anything that will make a 1940s car's engine and body get 200 mpg on gasoline, period. An internal combustion engine cannot turn a gallon of gas into enough energy to turn the driveshaft enough to move a 1940 car 200 miles.
See, what you're talking about is completely different from me, you're talking about the Smokey Yunick carburator design that was better, at the end of the lifetime of carburators. While the carburator worked amazing well for a carburator, it didn't beat the stupidest fuel injection system, and thus was never commercially developed. I.e., no cars were sold with it. Hence no 'men' came by and bothered anyone about it, because no one cared, unless Smokey Yunick decided to be an asshole for some reason and track down people who'd modified their own cars in violation his worthless patent. (Which really doesn't sound like him, considering he was the greatest cheater NASCAR ever saw.)
And at this point in time, thanks to emissions rules, cars burn 97% of their gas. Yes, 97%. There is no way in hell that doing anything to the gas to make it 'burn better' before it enters the engine could make them more than 3% more efficent. Cars waste energy inside the engine as heat and after in transfering the power to the wheels, they do not waste gas, except at full load (flooring it) and before the engine heats up. Heating the gas would make cold engines more efficent, except heating the engine makes a good deal more sense and they already have devices to do that. ANY claim that a device that makes the gasoline a magical mist and thus burn more to hugely increases fuel efficeny is a LIE.
In fact, the gasoline is already being sprayed as a rather fine mist via fuel injection. In fact, some cars have kinda of fuel injection to help mist it smaller, called 'the air-assist injector'. They get...um...about one or two mpg better. The tech is rather expensive, and not worth it to turn 97% into 98%.
Cars can get better engines and thus increase mpg. They can get better transmissions and thus better mpg. They can get less internal friction and thus increase mpg. They can regain some of their lost energy via regenerate braking and thus increase mpg. They can use other forms of energy to suppliment gasoline and thus increase mpg.
At this point in time, they will never get any sort of improvements to the input side of the engine to meaningfully increase mpg, because almost no waste is there. We might do away with the 'full load' problem, but people know that flooring their engine wastes gas already, and hybrid cars are being built that heat the engine before using it, and that's about it.
It also doesn't "spin at the menu" for anything near three hours. If you don't choose anything from the menu for a certain amount of time, it just starts playing the movie.
Mine doesn't do that, but I've seen others do it. But the solution is simple. If you're in the movie, you can just hit 'menu' and start it.
It is flatly impossible to hand someone encrypted data and a device to understand said data, and expect it to remain hidden. We need to take some cluebats and just beat that message into anyone who tries it for the fifty-seventh time.
Oh no, my PC is on fire, I better reach behind it to try to turn it off. Aiiieeee!
Most people have their PCs hooked up to easily accessible power strips so they can turn them off. Meanwhile, while most TVs are on power strips, these strips are usually hidden somewhere.
You're talking about Charles Nelson Pogue, aren't you?
Patents are public. That happened over 60 years ago, so any patents have expired. If it got that gas mileage, it would be in cars now.
And I won't accept any crap about how car companies are in cahoots with oil companies. You have to demonstrate that every car company for the past 60 years has been in cahoots with oil companies the entire time, including ones like Volkwagon under the Nazis and Toyota right now. Surely someone would take this public domain design if it was truely that good, some car company would go 'Hey, we can sell a lot of cars with this.'.
Hell, it'd be a third party add-on, even if the car companies didn't do it. (1)
The reason they aren't using that design is that it doesn't fucking work. Well, it works, in that it is a carburetor. It just didn't get any better gas mileage than others at the time, and get a hell of a lot less than modern fuel-injected systems.
Repeating crap stories that are easily disproven makes all 'company conspiracies' look insane. Often they do do things that are not in anyone's best interest but their own, but making conspiracies up is not helping others believe it when those things actually happen.
1) And now I'll get a link to someone who assures everyone that they have installed it and it does work, and I can pay 50 dollars to get the plans. Um, no. If it was legit, auto-repair places would be selling upgrades with a guarantee of at least 75 mpg gas mileage or something. Unless, of course, every single one of those was also in bed with the gas industry.
If i've paid to buy both the DVD and the content, why do i need to paid yet a third time to avoid watching the f*cking advertisements?
I don't understand this question. Are you implying that there is some sort of reason you wouldn't want to give more money to large corporations?
Don't you know that up to 10% of that money goes directly into employees' pockets? Employees just like you, with a wife, two point five mortgages, and a dog?
If you don't pay, how are they going afford watching TV?
My solution is to stick it in the DVD player well in advance of atcually watching it. Rented a DVD for later? Stick it in the DVD player as soon as I get home. It can sit and spin at the menu for three hours, I don't care, as long as it's ready to go when I finally get around to turning the TV and stereo on.
Incidentally, this is an absurd patent. It's an specification that allows you to send random tags to extend it. And the idea of marking content to not allow the skipping of ads obviously has prior art in DVD players. So what, exactly, is the novel bit of this? This looks like those patents where you take something everyone is doing, and add 'over the internet' to it. Philips just added 'over Multimedia Home Platform' to it.
And I won't dispute it at all. We need more restrictive patents on doing stupid and annoying stuff.;)
That's not my point. My point is, no matter how valid or invalid you think EULAs banning resell and whatnot are, and I'm with the camp that says 'Not at all'...this isn't that. They're real contracts.
As to what extent a company can sell asserts in bankruptcy, including things it otherwise couldn't sell, that is, indeed, up to the courts. I'm just saying that MS looks idiotic protesting to any resells...what it should be protesting is any alternation of the licensing beyond replacing one company name with another, because that's a much more valid complaint.
The is not such object as a 'sale', and it is not worth any money. MS does not a warehouse full of 'sales' sitting around, and misplaced one of them.
Do not talk about abstract nouns as if they were real.
If we're going to get all abstract, I'll say that giving MS any money is evil, thus can result in the losing of your soul. And a soul is infinitely more valuable than a sale. Traditionally, the market value of a soul has been 'Your every wish fulfilled', at least if you do business with Hell, Inc, and that's a good deal more than the purchase price of Windows.
Ah, no, MS's patches are usually for defects, often serious. Ford will not only replace serious defects for free, but track you do if they can, even if you are not the original owner of the car.
Don't start comparing the software industry to the automobile industry. Ford will win every time.;)
You can make backup copies of software media in both the US and the UK. Yes, as many as you want, despite the common misparsing of the law to mean 'a backup copy', and the EULAs that have codified this misreading into themselves. (It actually says a copy is legal if it's a backup copy. As would another be, and yet another. Every copy that is a backup copy is legal.)
And you can't be restricted during the install from making a backup copy, that's just completely idiotic. How would they know you made the copies after the install?
I don't know what you're implying about 'using' the copies all you want. If by 'using', you mean 'viewing the binary code on my computer in a hex editor' or 'attempting to play in my CD player', yes, you can, using a single backup copy at once.
If, however, by 'use', you mean 'install onto a computer', no, you can't. You can only make whatever copies are 'needed' to run it. That is, needed to run it on the machine you are running it on. You can't have copies that aren't needed to run it, and that includes installs on other machines.
It is, sadly, a common misconception that it's legal to install as many copies as you want as long as you only use one of them. That was true when software was on floppies, and you could make backups. It was legal to have as many of those as you want, sitting by as many computers as you want, as long as you only used one of them.
Copyright law, sadly, has no kept up with advances in technology, and makes no distinction between 'Copies installed on the hard drive' and 'copies executing in memory'. You can only make them if it is needed for you, right now, to use the program. As you can't legally use a program on two computers at once, any copies on the 'non-used' computer are not legal. (Except, heh, backup copies, which are legal under another law. And system recovery copies, also legal.)
OTOH, 'needed' is a somewhat loose concept. It pretty clearly allows network installs of application software if you only run it on one computer at once.
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I think from now on they've decided to go to the 'wear less clothing' concept.
It doesn't make any sense to say that doesn't make any sense.
If you have a hydro plant, you don't need 'pumped hydro'. Instead of taking the electricity generated by it during the night, and using it to pump the water back, which obviously doesn't make sense thermodynamically, you just let less water through at night.
Pumped hydro is way of making other power sources have the same buffer that hydro has, by turning them into hydro. You don't need to do it to hydro, and if you have both a non-hydro plant and an actual 'filled by rain' hydro plant nearby, instead of building some system to refill the lake, it's more efficent to use the non-hydro plant to provide power at all times, and only let water out for peak power. (This is what Georgia Power does where I live.)
You're basically spot on, but you didn't state the obvious: There's no point in taking a nuclear power plant down, unless you're going to keep it offline for a decade or so. Not because of time required to start it up, but simply because it's not going to save you any fuel.
Honestly, people. You see the tagline up there? 'News for Nerds'? Maybe you should get a little basic technical knowledge before posting a technical comment, like the fact that a hell of a lot of embedded systems uses Pentiums nowadays, and in fact that's basically the reason Intel still makes them. (They did the same thing with the 386 for a while.)
These embedded Pentiums are built using fairly current tech, you know, the tech that's getting the pathways as small as possible to reduce heat so you can run your P4 at 3.5Ghz? Except, of course, these chips are running at around 350Mhz instead, and hence use almost no power at all, or generate any heat, which means no CPU fan, or in fact any fans at all.(1) (Of course, a gigantic battery might need fans for other reasons.)
The advantages of this over other, lower-power solutions like ARM is that it's cheaper, they can take off-the shelf parts (The motherboards have PCI slots), the assemble programmers are easier to find, it's trivial to test the software on their own system, and they have modern memory protection. (Some custom embedded chips don't have MMUs.)
What the hell did you fools think this company was doing? Buying old Pentium computers and sticking them inside their stuff? No. They are using an embedded solution that happens to consist of chips that are decended from Pentiums.
1) Hell, some original Pentiums got along fine without CPU fans, just a big heatsink.
The amount of power used by an embedded Pentium is tiny compared to the amount of power wasted by storing it in a battery and recovering it.
The materials, in a bathroom, by weight, is less than any car. And cars are made of mostly metal and plastic, which go through long journeys to get here, while a lot of a 'room' is wood, and there are lumber mills within a hundred miles of everywhere. I used to drive by one every day. It has a hell of a lot more impact to manufacture any car than any room. (At least, any room sans furnishing.)
And, again, rooms last much longer than cars. The median age of homes is probably 1970, whereas the median age of cars is probably 1990.
Wood to build the walls: Not mined, renewable resource.
Drywall: Gypsum is mined in, probably, Nova Scotia, where they have enough to last basically forever. In fact, they already have too many mines for the demand, and the existing mines will probably last decades before they have to move over a few miles and dig more. In fact, it's common all over the world, and basically impossible to run out of, it's just exposed in Nova Scotia. And as it's merely CaSO4, and we'll never run out of calcium or sulfur, we'll never run out of it.
Porcelain toilet, sink, glass door on tub, tiles, mirror: All composed of silicon dioxide, aka sand, aka, the surface of the earth.
Plastic tub, plastic pipes. Ah, you got me there. They're made out of oil...
Hell, constantly driving around with two pounds of junk in your car, which everyone does, for a decade, alone uses more oil and generates more waste than an extra bathtub. Or accelerating rapidly instead of slowly.
And this isn't even mentioning the amount of waste we purchase and immediately throw away each day. Complaining about the materials used to make a room is inane, considering we get decades of use out of them.
And before you talk about energy in heating and cooling, like I said, the cost of that is directly related to where you choose to live and how modern your house is (and hence how little leakage there is), along with secondary concerns like what you keep the temperature at and how often you go in and out. The amount of empty space behind closed door is tertiary at best.
It reminds me of the people who say 'Turn off the water while you're brushing your teeth.'. Look, that might be important in Las Vegas, but I chose to actually live in a place with water. We pump it out of the ground, and we pump it back in, and can 'use' as much as we want. (By 'use', I mean 'move in a circle'. Obviously, putting junk in it would be different.) I'm wasting a tiny bit of electricity, and that's it. It probably costs more to watch 5 minutes of TV, or every time I open the fridge. (Which incidentally, I keep milk jugs full of water in if there is extra space, so all the cold doesn't fall out when I do that. That's as much to extend the lifetime of the fridge as to save electricity.)
Likewise, I have a house that's actually weather stripped, with correct ventilization in the attic, and I usually don't have to heat it more than 30 degrees or cool it more than 15, which I can do using the heat pump 99% of the time, because I don't live in the fucking artic wasteland they call North Dakota or even New England, or the desert they call Texas.
The size of a house is a pretend concern that people bring up because they are screwed up and think people should be poor, not out of any environmental concern. A LOT of 'environmentalism' is pretend concerns. Weather-protect your damn houses and buy somewhat fuel-efficient cars, and you're already doing fifty times better than people who don't do those thing but inanely recycle their newspapers and glass bottles.
And before anyone mentions 'heating and cooling the house', good insulation, bricks, less windows, and, hell, having a square house instead of a rectangular one, all have a lot more effect on your heating and cooling bill. Or just living in a place where the temperatures normally range from 95 to 35, instead of 75 to 10, so you're almost always heating off a heat pump instead of a heater coil.
Square footage of a house is almost completely irrelevant in the grand scheme of how much energy a house costs to run, and the idea that it's as important as the emissions and mpg of the car you drive is just pandering to the stereotype that enviromentalists are all poor.
And here's real food for thought: A good wat to reduce energy wastage is to have an airlock on a building. Normal houses do not have these. But big houses often do, called a foyer.
And, of course, we also do some nuclear. In fact, Georgia Power is supposed building a new nuclear power plant within a decade. Yay!
Everyone who thinks their power can supplied with wind or solar power are deluding themselves. We simply do not have the storage ability. Solar's a nice option in hot enviroments for helping peak air conditioning usage, but that's about it.
And while a nuclear waste leak might suck for people living near it, when the roads fail, which like I said, will happen in your lifetime, almost every single person in this country is going to starve to death.
Alternately, we could fucking maintain on things that, if they fail, kill us. Novel concept, I know.
Jesus Christ. What is it with the nuclear waste people? The odds we won't have a use for 'nuclear waste' in 100 years, thanks to breeder reactors and whatnot, is fairly slim, and then all the people who built concrete bunkers that would contain the waste for 100,000 years are going to look pretty damn stupid, especially if we can't safely break back into the things due to the threat of causing a leak.
Just built a layer below Fort Knox, put them in well designed barrels, and check them every few year.
It was not quashed because it was better, it died because it was solving a huge problem in the auto industry...that didn't exist anymore. Aka, the fact that mechanical control of fuel mixing was poor. No one needed or wanted a carburator that was more expensive and burned less fuel than the fuel injection system that car companies had just spent years developing. If it had been invented five years earlier, it might have caused less research into EFI and more into carburators, but it wasn't.
And, like I said, almost all this research has been due to emissions reduction, not increasing gas mileage. Cars lose huge amounts of energy within the engine and transfering that energy to the road. Burning 85% of the gas vs. 95% of the gas is almost completely meaningless, considering how craptacular everything else was in cars until the early 90s, when due to continually tightening enviromental guidelines they ran out of fixing stupid stuff like throwing gas out the exhaust and had to start fixing actual difficult problems like transmission efficency and coasting. (Luckly for them, at that point, it became much easier to alter internal setting in the car via computer based on what you were doing, which not only let the computer alter things in real time, but let them test in real time also.)
You can relate made-up stories that happened to other people all you want. There is not, and cannot be, any sort of magical carburator. The story just makes no sense. It is a physical fact that 97% of the gas is currently burned, and no engine built, oh, ten years after the invention of the internal combustion engine has ever burned less than 70%, so it is flatly impossible for any carburator to ever have even doubled fuel efficency, much less taken it from about 20 mpg to 200 mpg, like the story goes. It's akin to a magical noozle you put on the end of a garden hose to make to fill a swimming pool faster. There are plenty of ways to fill swimming pools fast, but you cannot solve that problem from that place, because that place is not the problem. It is, in fact, the other end and the size of the hose that's the problem. You cannot fix gas usage via the carburator. You cannot remove waste that is not there.
There are factually better transmission, the 'infinite' ones, that smoothly alter the gear ratio instead of 'switching gears'. Those cars get somewhat better gas mileage, but suck for cost and repair. (And hybrid cars where the engine always goes at one speed are probably going to obsolete both them and normal transmissions.) There are better engine designs, but not better and equally robust under the crappy conditions cars operate under. And you can always make the car lighter, but at some point it becomes unsafe(1) or you have to use expensive things like titanium. But you could probably built a non-hybrid, safe car that got 75 mpg right now. It wouldn't work in the winter, and it would cost 400,000 dollars, but you could do it.
And, of course, hybrid cars themselves, the probably biggest threat to gas usage. Huge increases in mpg, and the 'electical storage' industry is fairly new and has all sorts of exciting ideas. One of them will pan out, and we'll get even more huge savings of gas. Might be fuel cells, might be better conventional batteries, might be something we've never thought of, or even thought of and dismissed like flywheels. But, like what happened engines once we got the ability to simulate them on computer, I fully expect them to half the electrical lossage in hybrids within the decade.
Oddly enough, the oil industry hasn't stepped in and stopped any of those things, despite all current hybrid cars being patented and produced under just a few patents, which they could trivi
Until it expires, you dumbass. Patents last about 20 years. If you had bothered to what I was talking about, this all happened 60 years ago, this supposed magical carburator.
Which, incidentally, would be operating in violation of laws of engine efficieny if you could put it on a 1940s car and get 200 miles to the gallon like the inventor claimed. Someday, cars might get that much, but via incrimental improvements to weight and power lossage, and tech like regerative breaking. We will never invent anything that will make a 1940s car's engine and body get 200 mpg on gasoline, period. An internal combustion engine cannot turn a gallon of gas into enough energy to turn the driveshaft enough to move a 1940 car 200 miles.
See, what you're talking about is completely different from me, you're talking about the Smokey Yunick carburator design that was better, at the end of the lifetime of carburators. While the carburator worked amazing well for a carburator, it didn't beat the stupidest fuel injection system, and thus was never commercially developed. I.e., no cars were sold with it. Hence no 'men' came by and bothered anyone about it, because no one cared, unless Smokey Yunick decided to be an asshole for some reason and track down people who'd modified their own cars in violation his worthless patent. (Which really doesn't sound like him, considering he was the greatest cheater NASCAR ever saw.)
And at this point in time, thanks to emissions rules, cars burn 97% of their gas. Yes, 97%. There is no way in hell that doing anything to the gas to make it 'burn better' before it enters the engine could make them more than 3% more efficent. Cars waste energy inside the engine as heat and after in transfering the power to the wheels, they do not waste gas, except at full load (flooring it) and before the engine heats up. Heating the gas would make cold engines more efficent, except heating the engine makes a good deal more sense and they already have devices to do that. ANY claim that a device that makes the gasoline a magical mist and thus burn more to hugely increases fuel efficeny is a LIE.
In fact, the gasoline is already being sprayed as a rather fine mist via fuel injection. In fact, some cars have kinda of fuel injection to help mist it smaller, called 'the air-assist injector'. They get...um...about one or two mpg better. The tech is rather expensive, and not worth it to turn 97% into 98%.
Cars can get better engines and thus increase mpg. They can get better transmissions and thus better mpg. They can get less internal friction and thus increase mpg. They can regain some of their lost energy via regenerate braking and thus increase mpg. They can use other forms of energy to suppliment gasoline and thus increase mpg.
At this point in time, they will never get any sort of improvements to the input side of the engine to meaningfully increase mpg, because almost no waste is there. We might do away with the 'full load' problem, but people know that flooring their engine wastes gas already, and hybrid cars are being built that heat the engine before using it, and that's about it.
Mine doesn't do that, but I've seen others do it. But the solution is simple. If you're in the movie, you can just hit 'menu' and start it.
It is flatly impossible to hand someone encrypted data and a device to understand said data, and expect it to remain hidden. We need to take some cluebats and just beat that message into anyone who tries it for the fifty-seventh time.
Most people have their PCs hooked up to easily accessible power strips so they can turn them off. Meanwhile, while most TVs are on power strips, these strips are usually hidden somewhere.
Patents are public. That happened over 60 years ago, so any patents have expired. If it got that gas mileage, it would be in cars now.
And I won't accept any crap about how car companies are in cahoots with oil companies. You have to demonstrate that every car company for the past 60 years has been in cahoots with oil companies the entire time, including ones like Volkwagon under the Nazis and Toyota right now. Surely someone would take this public domain design if it was truely that good, some car company would go 'Hey, we can sell a lot of cars with this.'.
Hell, it'd be a third party add-on, even if the car companies didn't do it. (1)
The reason they aren't using that design is that it doesn't fucking work. Well, it works, in that it is a carburetor. It just didn't get any better gas mileage than others at the time, and get a hell of a lot less than modern fuel-injected systems.
Repeating crap stories that are easily disproven makes all 'company conspiracies' look insane. Often they do do things that are not in anyone's best interest but their own, but making conspiracies up is not helping others believe it when those things actually happen.
1) And now I'll get a link to someone who assures everyone that they have installed it and it does work, and I can pay 50 dollars to get the plans. Um, no. If it was legit, auto-repair places would be selling upgrades with a guarantee of at least 75 mpg gas mileage or something. Unless, of course, every single one of those was also in bed with the gas industry.
I don't understand this question. Are you implying that there is some sort of reason you wouldn't want to give more money to large corporations?
Don't you know that up to 10% of that money goes directly into employees' pockets? Employees just like you, with a wife, two point five mortgages, and a dog?
If you don't pay, how are they going afford watching TV?
What are you, some sort of communist?
That really depends on which translation you're reading, doesn't it?
Well, obviously the solution is to turn on this flag all the time.
Incidentally, this is an absurd patent. It's an specification that allows you to send random tags to extend it. And the idea of marking content to not allow the skipping of ads obviously has prior art in DVD players. So what, exactly, is the novel bit of this? This looks like those patents where you take something everyone is doing, and add 'over the internet' to it. Philips just added 'over Multimedia Home Platform' to it.
And I won't dispute it at all. We need more restrictive patents on doing stupid and annoying stuff. ;)
As to what extent a company can sell asserts in bankruptcy, including things it otherwise couldn't sell, that is, indeed, up to the courts. I'm just saying that MS looks idiotic protesting to any resells...what it should be protesting is any alternation of the licensing beyond replacing one company name with another, because that's a much more valid complaint.
[insert gag where we barter on price, and then you realize that I'm talking about how much you'll have to pay me to haul it away]
Do not talk about abstract nouns as if they were real.
If we're going to get all abstract, I'll say that giving MS any money is evil, thus can result in the losing of your soul. And a soul is infinitely more valuable than a sale. Traditionally, the market value of a soul has been 'Your every wish fulfilled', at least if you do business with Hell, Inc, and that's a good deal more than the purchase price of Windows.
Don't start comparing the software industry to the automobile industry. Ford will win every time. ;)
You can make backup copies of software media in both the US and the UK. Yes, as many as you want, despite the common misparsing of the law to mean 'a backup copy', and the EULAs that have codified this misreading into themselves. (It actually says a copy is legal if it's a backup copy. As would another be, and yet another. Every copy that is a backup copy is legal.)
And you can't be restricted during the install from making a backup copy, that's just completely idiotic. How would they know you made the copies after the install?
I don't know what you're implying about 'using' the copies all you want. If by 'using', you mean 'viewing the binary code on my computer in a hex editor' or 'attempting to play in my CD player', yes, you can, using a single backup copy at once.
If, however, by 'use', you mean 'install onto a computer', no, you can't. You can only make whatever copies are 'needed' to run it. That is, needed to run it on the machine you are running it on. You can't have copies that aren't needed to run it, and that includes installs on other machines.
It is, sadly, a common misconception that it's legal to install as many copies as you want as long as you only use one of them. That was true when software was on floppies, and you could make backups. It was legal to have as many of those as you want, sitting by as many computers as you want, as long as you only used one of them.
Copyright law, sadly, has no kept up with advances in technology, and makes no distinction between 'Copies installed on the hard drive' and 'copies executing in memory'. You can only make them if it is needed for you, right now, to use the program. As you can't legally use a program on two computers at once, any copies on the 'non-used' computer are not legal. (Except, heh, backup copies, which are legal under another law. And system recovery copies, also legal.)
OTOH, 'needed' is a somewhat loose concept. It pretty clearly allows network installs of application software if you only run it on one computer at once.