Could you not just sell a EU and US version of your product, that conveniently can run the same software, but sold with a different feature set? If the user chooses to download the EU version of the software with it's naughty patented playlists and rudimentary data structures then that's their problem.
The US was a huge exporter for many years, but unlike Norway, doesn't have the 'savings account' the GP mentioned. The oil is from the North Sea, also used/exported by the UK. Norway decided it would be better to secure their future and saved/invested the profit from their North Sea oil, the UK decided to spend it. Would you rather win $1,000,000 today or have $10,000 a year for your life, your kid's life, his kid's life etc. etc.
Same thing happens in companies - I know people who in the last big dot-con crash were working for privately owned companies, that had some money saved, and told their employees that there would be no cuts, no new R&D projects but no cancellation of existing ones, no new hires, but reasonable pay raises and so on. Basically business as usual as much as they could afford. Then when the market picks up they had a happy and committed workforce, and new products ready to go well ahead of their competition who'd upset their staff, laid everyone off, not developed anything new etc. They expanded very quickly and made a lot of money because the company owners wanted long term profitability. They had prepared for the possibility of a crash and came out of it in a better position than the majority of their competitors. If they were publicly traded I doubt they would have been allowed to operate in that fashion, and the end result would have been that a lot less money got made.
It collapsed where exactly? UK has just approved 8 new sites, Finland is accepting bids for a new sites. France is building new reactors. Slovakia, Poland, Canada, Romania, Bulgaria, South Korea, Kazakhstan are at some stage of developing new nuclear capacity. Is China still a third world nation? They have 27 reactors under construction. India has four, including a fast-breeder reactor.
You're correct, nuclear is definitely an industry that is collapsing.
Energy stored in a capacitor is 1/2 * C * V^2. 1 kWh is 3.6x10^6 joules. so we have C = 2*3.6x10^6 / V^2. So for 220v electric you need 148.5 Farads of capacitance for every kilowatt-hour. If you are only storing 110v you need 4x as much storage for the same energy. Also you need to do AC->DC->AC conversion. And capacitors leak.
If it was that simple and it made economic sense, then someone would be doing it, rather than pumping water up hills and heating up salt.
And more of that on big, open roads, with no junctions etc. It's very difficult to make a fair comparison. The usual argument I hear is that driving tests in the US are much easier than European ones.
4kx2kx20bppx60Hz video is around 10GB/s, which normally means a plugin PCIE card for most systems. There are systems out there that do that now - we make cards that do quad 1080p60 uncompressed over PCIE. If you have a suitable external interface like Thunderbolt you have a lot more options (especially with the PCIE transport - there are plenty of existing designs that could be put in a box at the end of a cable rather than a card in the PC).
There's more than just consumer electronics and hard disk drives out there. Build an array of SSDs that can sustain the read rates, or deal with multiple uncompressed video sources (that don't have any kind of flow control, either deal with the data or break) and suddenly you can watch Gb/s of bandwidth vanish in no time.
I've tried fighting my mobile phone company when they refused to honour my warranty due to 'water damage'. Two occasions - on one the LCD had broken (how do I know? Fixed it with a cheap one from ebay), on the second the stupid joystick bit had fallen out (no problems sir, that's a common fault, send it in we'll replace it). Both times got 'It's got water damage, that's why it's not working, we can't fix it, please pay us to send your handset back.' I wrote several letters, emails, phone calls etc. Was about a month before I got a form letter back from customer services.
It's quite clearly a scam to make you buy phone insurance next time around. There's got to be some environmentalist somewhere who'll take on the cause of stopping phone companies from making people bin phones that need a single part replaced because of spurious 'water' damage that is in no way the actual cause of the phone malfunction. I've tried to point out that a building full of EEs, that design circuits as complex if not more than a mobile phone, think they are talking out of their arses. It's like taking your car in to have the windscreen repaired and being told you've got a small oil leak, so the whole car needs writing off. Bastards.
I got a Dell inspiron 300m (12") at Uni for a pretty good price, and treated it just like you say. Admittedly it's a bit of Grandpa's broom now as pretty much everything but the case has been replaced at some point, but that was after a few years of abuse. The HDD was fine up until about a year ago when I had a message pop up (in Ubuntu - why doesn't Windows have SMART monitoring by default) saying that the drive might be on the way out.
Unfortunately any similar replacements are quite expensive. If I'd seen a Netbook with a suitable screen (I wouldn't want less than the 12" one) I'd have gone for it, performance isn't an issue and better battery life would be great, but nothing really came up that bested the 300m. I've still got it, because it's small enough to do all the things that people seem to use tablets for now (e.g. browse the internet whilst lazing on the sofa).
Go and buy a VW Polo Bluemotion then... Your maxima is about the size of a 3 series BMW. How do you think the economy of a 1960s BMW 2002 stacks up to a new one? Apples to oranges there I think.
Get a 125cc bike - 100+mpg, cheap to run, insure etc. The only thing that might cause a problem is rain, but a good set of waterproofs solves most of that. On the other hand though, you don't get stuck in traffic anymore.
You would have shat bricks if you were there when I started driving land rovers around the farm as a kid. Not to mention go-karts etc. I'd stay away from junior karting and junior motocross events as well, you'll have a coronary.
Apparently for Beverley Hillbillies (Money for Nothing) Mark Knopfler insisted on playing guitar for the album version. Since Knopfler had been playing the song for so long he was much more relaxed with it and Weird Al's Guitarist Jim West could play it more like the original version...
You should also ensure that the laser in your CD drive is correctly aligned so that the photons it emits are in phase with the originals used to make the CD master.
I think you may have missed the point... can we get a 'whoosh' mod for the cases where a poster must have had to duck to let the joke go over his head? I've got points to spare...
Define appropriate? The law says you can drive/screw at a certain age. People are told that they should wait longer - until they're responsible or meet some criteria (marriage?) or whatever. So to drive a car you have to be old enough, you need a license which probably means you have had lessons. Even if you're don't own a car you are prepared to. To stretch the analogy, abstinence is like giving someone the keys but not driving lessons and telling them not to get behind the wheel. Some kids will stay in the house, and do something wholesome. Others will get in the car and sit behind the wheel occasionally, maybe even start the engine and rev it a little. Some will go the whole way and take it for a spin, and end up wrapped around a tree. Given the opportunity a lot of people, not just kids, will do things they aren't supposed to because they are fun.
It would be great if we all learnt self control (although a lot less fun). It would also be great if we were more compassionate. We could be less corrupt. We could damage our environment less. We could work to improve things for everyone not just ourselves. The reality is that we are none of these things, and are not likely to be anytime soon. We could ignore our humanity and say we _should_ be like something, and not educate ourselves about the consequences of our actions and how to minimize them, but to do so is to condemn other people to mistakes we knew they would make.
From our high and mighty position we pass down edicts: You shall not know of contraception and STDs because you will never have sex. You will not learn how to defend yourself because you will never be put in a position where violence may be used against you. You will not wear a seatbelt because you will not crash this car. You will not learn to swim because you will never be near water. You will not accept reality because everything you need to know about life is in this book. It's like an anti health and safety. You don't need to turn the power off before working on this because won't touch a live wire. Don't wear a hard hat because you're not going to drop bricks are you? Run with those scissors, why would you fall over? If you can pull of resisting temptation then bully for you, but to use is a as a policy to protect everyone? That's just ignorant.
I used to live somewhere where there was a lot of drug dealing. So if I told you where that was do I get arrested for 'facilitating' the drug trade? What about if I put up a website with a list of areas known for dealing? Taking down a site like this does look like the simple solution, but at the end of the day it's all for show. Just like drugs if you bust the guys on the streets there are plenty more to take their place, the only solution to stopping it is to prevent the supply (or, for both sides of this analogy, to accept that people are going to do it, so find a way to legalize and take tax/profit from it). After all the demand is still out there, and so is the product. Someone will take on the job of putting the two together.
And meanwhile Dave Hartnett is letting multinational companies get away with tax fraud on an enormous scale. Vodafone, who actually saved the money for the interest on the tax bill they knew they should pay, have paid none of it. They even declared the amount 'saved' as a windfall profit. Apparently HMRC got no less than every penny they could from Vodafone. http://www.private-eye.co.uk/sections.php?section_link=in_the_back&issue=1289
They're just the biggest one. There are several cases where Hartnett, who doesn't seem to know a lot about tax, has made agreements with companies to settle tax bills against the guidance, or without the knowledge, of the actual tax experts who work for him. £0.95 Billion from Vodafone was sitting there to be taken - because they'd actually been reasonably honest in a sense - and somehow that got ignored. But it's OK, we'll make up the difference by pestering people on ebay over the amount of money they made on some junk they bought from ebay.
Anyone want to wager that the tax recovered probably doesn't cover the cost of landfill and environmental disposal for most of the crap that will get binned rather than sold on ebay?
You do realize that if you don't want to accept the realities of human nature you can close your eyes, stick your fingers in your ears and sing loudly until reality conforms to your ideals?
Token car analogy: What do you think is easier to achieve: Everyone giving up their cars or getting them to slow down a bit and wear seatbelts?
If not having sex is an 'option' for you, then the chances are that you will not choose that option... You might have the self control to do so, but it's fairly safe to say that the average human being will give into their impulses eventually. There was a study (reported on slashdot IIRC) that showed teenagers who were abstinent were more likely to catch stds/get pregnant than those who weren't, mainly because the non-abstinent teenagers were prepared and had contraception etc.
What's uneconomical about it? There's a huge investment cost, made worse in some cases by the amount of legal objection to building plants, but after that's paid off the plants print money. Have you seen how much tax the German government is taking of Nuclear power plant profits?
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Could you not just sell a EU and US version of your product, that conveniently can run the same software, but sold with a different feature set? If the user chooses to download the EU version of the software with it's naughty patented playlists and rudimentary data structures then that's their problem.
The US was a huge exporter for many years, but unlike Norway, doesn't have the 'savings account' the GP mentioned. The oil is from the North Sea, also used/exported by the UK. Norway decided it would be better to secure their future and saved/invested the profit from their North Sea oil, the UK decided to spend it. Would you rather win $1,000,000 today or have $10,000 a year for your life, your kid's life, his kid's life etc. etc.
Same thing happens in companies - I know people who in the last big dot-con crash were working for privately owned companies, that had some money saved, and told their employees that there would be no cuts, no new R&D projects but no cancellation of existing ones, no new hires, but reasonable pay raises and so on. Basically business as usual as much as they could afford. Then when the market picks up they had a happy and committed workforce, and new products ready to go well ahead of their competition who'd upset their staff, laid everyone off, not developed anything new etc. They expanded very quickly and made a lot of money because the company owners wanted long term profitability. They had prepared for the possibility of a crash and came out of it in a better position than the majority of their competitors. If they were publicly traded I doubt they would have been allowed to operate in that fashion, and the end result would have been that a lot less money got made.
Yeah, it's £450 over here - so approx $720. If it would cost me the £280 that it cost you I'd probably be buying one now...
It collapsed where exactly? UK has just approved 8 new sites, Finland is accepting bids for a new sites. France is building new reactors. Slovakia, Poland, Canada, Romania, Bulgaria, South Korea, Kazakhstan are at some stage of developing new nuclear capacity. Is China still a third world nation? They have 27 reactors under construction. India has four, including a fast-breeder reactor.
You're correct, nuclear is definitely an industry that is collapsing.
BTU /= hp * some_factor. Unit of energy = work * time. Hence BTU = hp * some_amount_of_time * some_factor
Energy stored in a capacitor is 1/2 * C * V^2. 1 kWh is 3.6x10^6 joules. so we have C = 2*3.6x10^6 / V^2. So for 220v electric you need 148.5 Farads of capacitance for every kilowatt-hour. If you are only storing 110v you need 4x as much storage for the same energy. Also you need to do AC->DC->AC conversion. And capacitors leak.
If it was that simple and it made economic sense, then someone would be doing it, rather than pumping water up hills and heating up salt.
And more of that on big, open roads, with no junctions etc. It's very difficult to make a fair comparison. The usual argument I hear is that driving tests in the US are much easier than European ones.
Indeed, and from the land of NASCAR...
4kx2kx20bppx60Hz video is around 10GB/s, which normally means a plugin PCIE card for most systems. There are systems out there that do that now - we make cards that do quad 1080p60 uncompressed over PCIE. If you have a suitable external interface like Thunderbolt you have a lot more options (especially with the PCIE transport - there are plenty of existing designs that could be put in a box at the end of a cable rather than a card in the PC).
There's more than just consumer electronics and hard disk drives out there. Build an array of SSDs that can sustain the read rates, or deal with multiple uncompressed video sources (that don't have any kind of flow control, either deal with the data or break) and suddenly you can watch Gb/s of bandwidth vanish in no time.
I've tried fighting my mobile phone company when they refused to honour my warranty due to 'water damage'. Two occasions - on one the LCD had broken (how do I know? Fixed it with a cheap one from ebay), on the second the stupid joystick bit had fallen out (no problems sir, that's a common fault, send it in we'll replace it). Both times got 'It's got water damage, that's why it's not working, we can't fix it, please pay us to send your handset back.' I wrote several letters, emails, phone calls etc. Was about a month before I got a form letter back from customer services.
It's quite clearly a scam to make you buy phone insurance next time around. There's got to be some environmentalist somewhere who'll take on the cause of stopping phone companies from making people bin phones that need a single part replaced because of spurious 'water' damage that is in no way the actual cause of the phone malfunction. I've tried to point out that a building full of EEs, that design circuits as complex if not more than a mobile phone, think they are talking out of their arses. It's like taking your car in to have the windscreen repaired and being told you've got a small oil leak, so the whole car needs writing off. Bastards.
I got a Dell inspiron 300m (12") at Uni for a pretty good price, and treated it just like you say. Admittedly it's a bit of Grandpa's broom now as pretty much everything but the case has been replaced at some point, but that was after a few years of abuse. The HDD was fine up until about a year ago when I had a message pop up (in Ubuntu - why doesn't Windows have SMART monitoring by default) saying that the drive might be on the way out.
Unfortunately any similar replacements are quite expensive. If I'd seen a Netbook with a suitable screen (I wouldn't want less than the 12" one) I'd have gone for it, performance isn't an issue and better battery life would be great, but nothing really came up that bested the 300m. I've still got it, because it's small enough to do all the things that people seem to use tablets for now (e.g. browse the internet whilst lazing on the sofa).
Go and buy a VW Polo Bluemotion then... Your maxima is about the size of a 3 series BMW. How do you think the economy of a 1960s BMW 2002 stacks up to a new one? Apples to oranges there I think.
Get a 125cc bike - 100+mpg, cheap to run, insure etc. The only thing that might cause a problem is rain, but a good set of waterproofs solves most of that. On the other hand though, you don't get stuck in traffic anymore.
You would have shat bricks if you were there when I started driving land rovers around the farm as a kid. Not to mention go-karts etc. I'd stay away from junior karting and junior motocross events as well, you'll have a coronary.
Nope, we'll give up on licensing guns and see how that works out for us...
Apparently for Beverley Hillbillies (Money for Nothing) Mark Knopfler insisted on playing guitar for the album version. Since Knopfler had been playing the song for so long he was much more relaxed with it and Weird Al's Guitarist Jim West could play it more like the original version...
You should also ensure that the laser in your CD drive is correctly aligned so that the photons it emits are in phase with the originals used to make the CD master.
I think you may have missed the point... can we get a 'whoosh' mod for the cases where a poster must have had to duck to let the joke go over his head? I've got points to spare...
Next time you're being mugged tell them that they can't have the money because you are likely funding an illegal drug habit...
Define appropriate? The law says you can drive/screw at a certain age. People are told that they should wait longer - until they're responsible or meet some criteria (marriage?) or whatever. So to drive a car you have to be old enough, you need a license which probably means you have had lessons. Even if you're don't own a car you are prepared to. To stretch the analogy, abstinence is like giving someone the keys but not driving lessons and telling them not to get behind the wheel. Some kids will stay in the house, and do something wholesome. Others will get in the car and sit behind the wheel occasionally, maybe even start the engine and rev it a little. Some will go the whole way and take it for a spin, and end up wrapped around a tree. Given the opportunity a lot of people, not just kids, will do things they aren't supposed to because they are fun.
It would be great if we all learnt self control (although a lot less fun). It would also be great if we were more compassionate. We could be less corrupt. We could damage our environment less. We could work to improve things for everyone not just ourselves. The reality is that we are none of these things, and are not likely to be anytime soon. We could ignore our humanity and say we _should_ be like something, and not educate ourselves about the consequences of our actions and how to minimize them, but to do so is to condemn other people to mistakes we knew they would make.
From our high and mighty position we pass down edicts: You shall not know of contraception and STDs because you will never have sex. You will not learn how to defend yourself because you will never be put in a position where violence may be used against you. You will not wear a seatbelt because you will not crash this car. You will not learn to swim because you will never be near water. You will not accept reality because everything you need to know about life is in this book. It's like an anti health and safety. You don't need to turn the power off before working on this because won't touch a live wire. Don't wear a hard hat because you're not going to drop bricks are you? Run with those scissors, why would you fall over? If you can pull of resisting temptation then bully for you, but to use is a as a policy to protect everyone? That's just ignorant.
I used to live somewhere where there was a lot of drug dealing. So if I told you where that was do I get arrested for 'facilitating' the drug trade? What about if I put up a website with a list of areas known for dealing? Taking down a site like this does look like the simple solution, but at the end of the day it's all for show. Just like drugs if you bust the guys on the streets there are plenty more to take their place, the only solution to stopping it is to prevent the supply (or, for both sides of this analogy, to accept that people are going to do it, so find a way to legalize and take tax/profit from it). After all the demand is still out there, and so is the product. Someone will take on the job of putting the two together.
And meanwhile Dave Hartnett is letting multinational companies get away with tax fraud on an enormous scale. Vodafone, who actually saved the money for the interest on the tax bill they knew they should pay, have paid none of it. They even declared the amount 'saved' as a windfall profit. Apparently HMRC got no less than every penny they could from Vodafone. http://www.private-eye.co.uk/sections.php?section_link=in_the_back&issue=1289
They're just the biggest one. There are several cases where Hartnett, who doesn't seem to know a lot about tax, has made agreements with companies to settle tax bills against the guidance, or without the knowledge, of the actual tax experts who work for him. £0.95 Billion from Vodafone was sitting there to be taken - because they'd actually been reasonably honest in a sense - and somehow that got ignored. But it's OK, we'll make up the difference by pestering people on ebay over the amount of money they made on some junk they bought from ebay.
Anyone want to wager that the tax recovered probably doesn't cover the cost of landfill and environmental disposal for most of the crap that will get binned rather than sold on ebay?
You do realize that if you don't want to accept the realities of human nature you can close your eyes, stick your fingers in your ears and sing loudly until reality conforms to your ideals?
Token car analogy: What do you think is easier to achieve: Everyone giving up their cars or getting them to slow down a bit and wear seatbelts?
If not having sex is an 'option' for you, then the chances are that you will not choose that option... You might have the self control to do so, but it's fairly safe to say that the average human being will give into their impulses eventually. There was a study (reported on slashdot IIRC) that showed teenagers who were abstinent were more likely to catch stds/get pregnant than those who weren't, mainly because the non-abstinent teenagers were prepared and had contraception etc.
What's uneconomical about it? There's a huge investment cost, made worse in some cases by the amount of legal objection to building plants, but after that's paid off the plants print money. Have you seen how much tax the German government is taking of Nuclear power plant profits?