Do the math on it. Figure out how much money the oil company would lose by having the miracle fuel system out there, and figure out how much people would be willing to pay for it.
Remember that any individual oil company only owns a small part of the market, but by owning a fuel-reducing patent, could get *all* of the revenues from that product.
It seems to me that when posting a story like this, at least one of the links should lead to something that actually discusses the subject of the article.
Here is a link to the actual section of the Google AdSense FAQ that mentions the dollar per Firefox install:
Also, Google currently has over 7.5 billion dollars in the bank, so yeah, they could pay one dollar for EVERY PERSON ON EARTH to install Firefox and not go broke.
Here's a better idea: If you can repeatably show "evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event", James Randi will pay you one... MILLION dollars.
If you're willing to put a time limit on it, I will gladly enter into a $1000 wager with you on whether or not ghosts or other similar phenomena will be proven to be real in that time frame.
Thanks for the info. Since the speaker outputs are little headphone jacks, this might be challenging, but I'll look into it.
I've got the software volume controls maxed out, so that I can have the hardware volume control on the (amplified) speakers turned down. However, when I power-off, suspend, power-up, or wake my PC, there's a very loud one-time pop on the speakers.
I was going to post about how the rocket was probably shot down by the United States, to prevent global warming information from getting out, but then I remembered that shooting down a rocket is impossible.
On every other site on teh Intarweb, I can hit alt-E > F to bring up Firefox's 'find' toolbar. Wikipedia overrides alt-E so that it instead launches the editor for that page.
Workaround on Windows: Press and release Alt, and *then* press E. That brings up the Firefox 'edit' menu.
how exactly did they FORCE him to sell his shares for less than their worth? the market wants to know!
id Software is a privately traded company -- it's not like he could have taken them and sold them on the market, and it was probably a part of his contract that he had to sell them when he left the company.
Hopefully this will become a trend of radically increasing consumer internet speeds.
Yeah, hopefully a trend like that will start. I mean, my Internet connection speed has only gone from 2400bps in 1993 to 1.5Mbps today -- that's only one doubling every 16 or so months!
My almost five-year-old ReplayTV is starting to show its age. I don't have the free time or the inclination to build a MythTV box.
What is the current state of the art in High Definition DVRs? I know that TiVo put one out about a year and a half ago, but stories like this make me hesitant to deal with TiVo.
I have DirecTV, which means that if I use 'their' DVR, I'm still using a TiVo. (right?)
Mostly, what I want is:
1) Ability to do with HDTV the same thing I can do with SDTV today -- time shift, pause, skip over commercials, etc (I love the 30-second and 7-second buttons on my Replay!)
2) Not difficult to export for archiving on DVD
3) Handles over-the-air HDTV as well as what might come down the pipe from DirecTV
[The United States is]...a society that suffers very rare and mild terrorist attacks. (Killing Americans at 0.001% the rate of common car accidents.)
Car accident : terrorism is 100,000 : 1?
Over the past 25 years, about 4000 Americans have been murdered by Muslim terrorists. In that same time period, about 35000 x 25, or 875,000 people have been killed in car accidents. I have no idea what the actual number is, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that somewhere between 25% and 75% of those people caused the accident that killed them, meaning that somewhere between 225,000 and 650,000 Americans were killed by car accidents that were not their own fault. That's a ratio of somewhere between 50:1 and 160:1 -- you're off by as much as three orders of magnitude.
Of course, even 50:1 means that terrorism is a much lower risk than not-your-fault car accidents. But we already put a *lot* of effort into preventing traffic fatalities. Any new car that you buy today could easily be several thousand dollars cheaper if it didn't need to include safety glass, airbags, roll cages, crumple zones, and the like. I'd be willing to guess that the number of man-hours put into seatbelt, speed limit, and DUI enforcement around the country dwarfs the number of man-hours put into antiterrorism activity.
Not only that, but they typically measure the amount of gasoline that you bought down to the thousandth of a gallon -- The "true" price of whatever you pumped should then be specified down to the millionth of a dollar, or ten-thousandth of a penny.
To avoid rounding issues, if they're going to specify the price down to 1/1000 of a dollar, they'd have to have pumps with a granularity of ten gallons.
My local school district only provides bus service to students that live at least 1.5 miles from school. However, the school busses seem to stop every few blocks when I get behind one in the morning. The obvious solution is to put school bus stops at least two miles apart. Less stopping-and-starting means more fuel efficiency!
I went to 13 years of public school, and all it taught me was how to interact with people born between October 15, 1974, and October 14, 1975. When I got out into the real world, I had no idea how to interact as an equal with people who were 20 years my senior.
I'll leave up to the other replies to discuss whether or not the socialization aspect of public school is otherwise a good thing.
The bet went from 1980 to 1990. In 1980, the price of a barrel of oil was at around $37 in 1980 dollars, and in 1990, by amazing luck due to the Iraq / Kuwait / USA crisis, it briefly spiked from ~$20 to ~$35 in 1990 dollars. However, if you normalize those numbers to 2005 dollars, then oil went from around $85 to $50/barrel.
I was unable to find similar data for lumber, and water isn't something that's typically traded on the commodities market.
Had the basket of goods consisted entirely of oil, Ehrlich would still have written a check to Simon in the amount of around $412, compared to the actual check amount of $576. Had they entered into their agreement two months earlier, or a few months later, then the inflation-adjusted difference would have been about 30/85 -- meaning that Ehrlich would have written Simon a check for about $647.
Also, (IIRC) Ehrlich was the one who chose the basket of commodities, and Simon's only rule was that it couldn't be more than 30% oil.
The small 45 MPG smart car uses the same basic technology as an SUV -- just a lot less of it. Yeah, a Hydrogen / Electric / Magic fairy dust car would cost more to develop, but the car manufacturers would gladly do so if there was profit in it. As I said in my earlier post, they're neutral in all of this.
As for safety, I'll agree that European cars are probably not any more unsafe. However, American crashworthiness standards require more strength and rigidity than can be done in a small, light car. Unfortunately, what they're actually measuring only weakly correlates to what they claim they're measuring.
WE dont have that car or the smartcar here because GW bush and his buddies in oil and auto industries desperately do not want it here.
So? W doesn't want Internet Porn, Abortion, homosexuality, or cute little puppies either. However, we live in a free country, and someone who wants to offer those things is able to do so.
Of course, to make cars like that legal, you'd need to substantially reduce safety and emissions rules on cars -- no 'stock' European car could pass American safety and emissions standards. Stand on a street corner in Europe sometime, and watch how even the late model cars give off a puff of smoke every time they accelerate away from a light.
Why do you think that the Auto industry doesn't want to sell anything other than gas guzzlers? They're really the neutral parties in this. They'd happily sell electric cars, hybrid cars, hydrogen cars, fairy-dust-powered cars, or anything else that they perceived that it was possible to build and that people would be willing to pay for.
While GW might have buddies in the industry, do you really think that every car company is willing to do what he says? Do you think that Ford, Chevy, GM, Kia, BMW, Aston Martin (are they still around?) Renault, Saab, Trabant, some Indian car company that you've never heard of, Mazda, and all of the others all march to Bush's orders?
Finally, if you want more fuel-efficient cars, the easiest way to get them is to get rid of the extra weight and power loss caused by things like steel reinforcements in the door. European cars aren't as crashworthy as American cars, a fact for which you can thank Bush's good buddy Ralph Nader for.
Makes you wonder what management team let it get non-competitive in the first place, and why are they not affected by the cuts?
That would be Carly, and she's already been affected. Affected to the tune of a $40M payout package, but since getting rid of her caused HP's total market cap to go up several billion dollars, getting rid of her was money well spent.
Of course, most of those 'silent' movies do have a soundtrack -- it was shipped as sheet music to a guy whose job was to play the piano while the movie was playing.
'Plausible deniablity' doesn't mean quite what it sounds like in that quote -- in this case, 'plausible deniability' means a situation specifically set up so that any denial is 'plausible', Mr. King is not making any claims on the actual plausibility of their claims.
Here's another example, said on Slashdot occasionally: "I run an open WiFi network so that I can have plausible deniability for everything that goes across my Internet connection".
Here's some free advice: If you want to read a book without the government knowing about it, don't walk into a government-owned building and ask a government employee if you can borrow it.
Slashdot Mirror
Do the math on it. Figure out how much money the oil company would lose by having the miracle fuel system out there, and figure out how much people would be willing to pay for it.
Remember that any individual oil company only owns a small part of the market, but by owning a fuel-reducing patent, could get *all* of the revenues from that product.
Yeah, I know, funny doesn't give karma. However, it's still a little concerning to see this moderated "interesting".
It seems to me that when posting a story like this, at least one of the links should lead to something that actually discusses the subject of the article.
p y?answer=27406&ctx=en:search&query=firefox&topic=0 &type=f
Here is a link to the actual section of the Google AdSense FAQ that mentions the dollar per Firefox install:
http://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.
Also, Google currently has over 7.5 billion dollars in the bank, so yeah, they could pay one dollar for EVERY PERSON ON EARTH to install Firefox and not go broke.
Here's a better idea: If you can repeatably show "evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event", James Randi will pay you one... MILLION dollars.
If you're willing to put a time limit on it, I will gladly enter into a $1000 wager with you on whether or not ghosts or other similar phenomena will be proven to be real in that time frame.
Never use an acronym without defining it. Telling someone they can look it up doesn't count.
Thanks for the reply. I tried that, but it didn't help.
Thanks for the info. Since the speaker outputs are little headphone jacks, this might be challenging, but I'll look into it.
I've got the software volume controls maxed out, so that I can have the hardware volume control on the (amplified) speakers turned down. However, when I power-off, suspend, power-up, or wake my PC, there's a very loud one-time pop on the speakers.
I was going to post about how the rocket was probably shot down by the United States, to prevent global warming information from getting out, but then I remembered that shooting down a rocket is impossible.
On every other site on teh Intarweb, I can hit alt-E > F to bring up Firefox's 'find' toolbar. Wikipedia overrides alt-E so that it instead launches the editor for that page.
Workaround on Windows: Press and release Alt, and *then* press E. That brings up the Firefox 'edit' menu.
id Software is a privately traded company -- it's not like he could have taken them and sold them on the market, and it was probably a part of his contract that he had to sell them when he left the company.
Yeah, hopefully a trend like that will start. I mean, my Internet connection speed has only gone from 2400bps in 1993 to 1.5Mbps today -- that's only one doubling every 16 or so months!
My almost five-year-old ReplayTV is starting to show its age. I don't have the free time or the inclination to build a MythTV box.
What is the current state of the art in High Definition DVRs? I know that TiVo put one out about a year and a half ago, but stories like this make me hesitant to deal with TiVo.
I have DirecTV, which means that if I use 'their' DVR, I'm still using a TiVo. (right?)
Mostly, what I want is:
1) Ability to do with HDTV the same thing I can do with SDTV today -- time shift, pause, skip over commercials, etc (I love the 30-second and 7-second buttons on my Replay!)
2) Not difficult to export for archiving on DVD
3) Handles over-the-air HDTV as well as what might come down the pipe from DirecTV
Any suggestions?
Car accident : terrorism is 100,000 : 1?
Over the past 25 years, about 4000 Americans have been murdered by Muslim terrorists. In that same time period, about 35000 x 25, or 875,000 people have been killed in car accidents. I have no idea what the actual number is, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that somewhere between 25% and 75% of those people caused the accident that killed them, meaning that somewhere between 225,000 and 650,000 Americans were killed by car accidents that were not their own fault. That's a ratio of somewhere between 50:1 and 160:1 -- you're off by as much as three orders of magnitude.
Of course, even 50:1 means that terrorism is a much lower risk than not-your-fault car accidents. But we already put a *lot* of effort into preventing traffic fatalities. Any new car that you buy today could easily be several thousand dollars cheaper if it didn't need to include safety glass, airbags, roll cages, crumple zones, and the like. I'd be willing to guess that the number of man-hours put into seatbelt, speed limit, and DUI enforcement around the country dwarfs the number of man-hours put into antiterrorism activity.
Not only that, but they typically measure the amount of gasoline that you bought down to the thousandth of a gallon -- The "true" price of whatever you pumped should then be specified down to the millionth of a dollar, or ten-thousandth of a penny.
To avoid rounding issues, if they're going to specify the price down to 1/1000 of a dollar, they'd have to have pumps with a granularity of ten gallons.
My local school district only provides bus service to students that live at least 1.5 miles from school. However, the school busses seem to stop every few blocks when I get behind one in the morning. The obvious solution is to put school bus stops at least two miles apart. Less stopping-and-starting means more fuel efficiency!
I went to 13 years of public school, and all it taught me was how to interact with people born between October 15, 1974, and October 14, 1975. When I got out into the real world, I had no idea how to interact as an equal with people who were 20 years my senior.
I'll leave up to the other replies to discuss whether or not the socialization aspect of public school is otherwise a good thing.
The bet went from 1980 to 1990. In 1980, the price of a barrel of oil was at around $37 in 1980 dollars, and in 1990, by amazing luck due to the Iraq / Kuwait / USA crisis, it briefly spiked from ~$20 to ~$35 in 1990 dollars. However, if you normalize those numbers to 2005 dollars, then oil went from around $85 to $50/barrel.
I was unable to find similar data for lumber, and water isn't something that's typically traded on the commodities market.
Had the basket of goods consisted entirely of oil, Ehrlich would still have written a check to Simon in the amount of around $412, compared to the actual check amount of $576. Had they entered into their agreement two months earlier, or a few months later, then the inflation-adjusted difference would have been about 30/85 -- meaning that Ehrlich would have written Simon a check for about $647.
Also, (IIRC) Ehrlich was the one who chose the basket of commodities, and Simon's only rule was that it couldn't be more than 30% oil.
The small 45 MPG smart car uses the same basic technology as an SUV -- just a lot less of it. Yeah, a Hydrogen / Electric / Magic fairy dust car would cost more to develop, but the car manufacturers would gladly do so if there was profit in it. As I said in my earlier post, they're neutral in all of this.
As for safety, I'll agree that European cars are probably not any more unsafe. However, American crashworthiness standards require more strength and rigidity than can be done in a small, light car. Unfortunately, what they're actually measuring only weakly correlates to what they claim they're measuring.
So? W doesn't want Internet Porn, Abortion, homosexuality, or cute little puppies either. However, we live in a free country, and someone who wants to offer those things is able to do so.
Of course, to make cars like that legal, you'd need to substantially reduce safety and emissions rules on cars -- no 'stock' European car could pass American safety and emissions standards. Stand on a street corner in Europe sometime, and watch how even the late model cars give off a puff of smoke every time they accelerate away from a light.
Why do you think that the Auto industry doesn't want to sell anything other than gas guzzlers? They're really the neutral parties in this. They'd happily sell electric cars, hybrid cars, hydrogen cars, fairy-dust-powered cars, or anything else that they perceived that it was possible to build and that people would be willing to pay for.
While GW might have buddies in the industry, do you really think that every car company is willing to do what he says? Do you think that Ford, Chevy, GM, Kia, BMW, Aston Martin (are they still around?) Renault, Saab, Trabant, some Indian car company that you've never heard of, Mazda, and all of the others all march to Bush's orders?
Finally, if you want more fuel-efficient cars, the easiest way to get them is to get rid of the extra weight and power loss caused by things like steel reinforcements in the door. European cars aren't as crashworthy as American cars, a fact for which you can thank Bush's good buddy Ralph Nader for.
That would be Carly, and she's already been affected. Affected to the tune of a $40M payout package, but since getting rid of her caused HP's total market cap to go up several billion dollars, getting rid of her was money well spent.
Of course, most of those 'silent' movies do have a soundtrack -- it was shipped as sheet music to a guy whose job was to play the piano while the movie was playing.
Well, at least they'll take up less space than the current annoying MPEG2 intros...
'Plausible deniablity' doesn't mean quite what it sounds like in that quote -- in this case, 'plausible deniability' means a situation specifically set up so that any denial is 'plausible', Mr. King is not making any claims on the actual plausibility of their claims.
Here's another example, said on Slashdot occasionally: "I run an open WiFi network so that I can have plausible deniability for everything that goes across my Internet connection".
Here's some free advice: If you want to read a book without the government knowing about it, don't walk into a government-owned building and ask a government employee if you can borrow it.