As a matter of interest, how do you charge your bluetooth headphones? Plug them into a charging device, perhaps? So how does that cable/socket combo handle your rough handling? Why is it different from a 3.5 plug/socket combo?
I was eight, watching it unfold on black & white TV, impressed because my parents told me how amazing it was, then going to school and not quite understanding just how significant the whole thing was.
We had information packs with lots of diagrams, and blocks of text with arrows all over. Info about the moon, the trajectory, the astronauts, a foldout showing the layers of the space suits, the rocket and stages, etc. Still got most of it somewhere in storage.
It was only later I found out how much involvement we in Oz had, via the Parkes radio telescope facility. I should watch "The Dish" again - it's a good film.
In no particular order, Blade Runner, Dark Star, Planet of the Apes (w/ Charlton Heston), Silent Running, Donnie Darko, Metropolis, Alien, Aliens, The Terminator, Terminator 2, The Man who fell to Earth, Solaris, Serenity (+Firefly) for starters.
They want more money. The Copyright Royalties Board decided that streaming royalties would increase, and small broadcasters' offsets would stop, and that's why Live365 closed. I was a subscriber, my favourite stations moved to different services, and I'm not going to pay each of those services to listen to 1 or 2 stations, so the net result is - artists who were getting a little bit of money from my subscription are now getting nothing.
I decided to leave my last place of employment due to moderate depression about the circumstances, which I couldn't imagine getting any better without the immediate departure of my supervisor, lets call him B1 (classic story - a business graduate in an IT management position). I went to see my doctor to explain the situation, and he agreed I was headed for Depression Street. He wrote a letter saying I needed three weeks off (all of my accumulated sick leave). One week into that, and I delivered another letter to HR (copy to my supervisor's supervisor - call him B2), giving two weeks notice. I had no sick leave left, but they had to pay out my accumulated vacation time.
I had phone calls from B2 and B3 expressing regret about my circumstances, but they didn't offer to transfer me to another area, or anything like that. I found out later on that B1 only lasted a couple of months after I left. Too late, I had another job.
IIRC, here in Oz they have to be rated for rooftop fixtures according to the zone they're in. Where I live, we have from zero to four cyclones a year, so the panels and mounts have to meet that standard. In practice, brand-name panels are all rated to the highest (wait for it) danger zone - hail, cyclones, etc.
You need a lot of panels to power an AC compressor, plus those compressors have a huge starting surge, so you need to over-build to cope with that. Look at the specification plate of an AC compressor for the average run-time current draw, then multiply that by 4 or 5 for the startup surge. Your inverter must be able to supply that current for a second or two, plus the run-time current for hours and hours. The panels are not going to be able to do that outside the 9am-3pm window, so you need either the grid or a huge battery bank.
There are slow-start washing machine motors - is it possible to duplicate that in an AC compressor?
Small bonus - the PV panels will also shade your roof, at the cost of reduced efficiency. OTOH, I've seen plans to run water pipes along the backs of PV panels to cool them, and to pre-heat your hot water.
Unfortunately some architects focus on the aesthetics and not practicalities. We had an architect from a colder climate re-design our community centre, and he refused to put in *any* active cooling - no AC, no fans, no ducted exhaust. He seemed to think that the high ceiling with louvres at the top, and more at the bottom, would provide sufficient ventilation during summer. He even removed the existing ceiling fans because they "obscured the decorative plasterwork". When some elderly folk started fainting during performances, the committee rapidly put the fans back in.
The point is, architects don't always design for practicality, and that can become expensive later. This guy didn't do any research about about how much heat 200+ bodies generate, how much heat stage lights generate (fortunately they were recently replaced by LED units), how much worse that feels during hot and humid weather, and what's needed to pump that heat away.
Our fault for choosing him, of course - I dare say the committee was blinded by his awards.
So, 1. have the underground pipes on a slight downward angle with a drain at the lowest point, to stop pooling, and 2. use copper pipes. Better energy transfer than plastic, and microorganisms don't propagate on elemental Cu.
AC also causes condensation - on the "outside", admittedly, but it's still there, and must be dealt with, so systems are designed to mitigate. There's no reason why non-compressor systems can't also be designed to deal with it.
Because if you download a song (or torrent an album, or copy a friend's CD, whatever) to keep it and listen to it more than once, you have conceded that it has value to you.
What's left is negotiation about the amount.
Unless you think that artists *owe* you their efforts?
I think the finance managers at the streaming services should re-think their strategies. Putting aside free, ad-supported playback for the moment, they seemed to think that $10 or $12 per month was a "sweet spot" - the point at which consumers were happy to pay, without frightening them off to a cheaper service. It seems obvious that wasn't enough to cope with the licencing/royalties set by the CRB.
I was a Live365 subscriber, listening to stations that *weren't* full of material by well-known artists - I like exploring music that I haven't heard before. When they emailed me late last year to say they were closing down (mainly because of a royalty rate rise that small stations couldn't afford), I told them I'd be happy to pay more. They mustn't have thought it was a viable option to survey their subscribers about raising subscription rates, because they proceeded to shut down.
Yes, $10/month *sounds* nice, but it's not very much for such a lot of choice, and now those artists who were getting *some* income from Live365 stations are getting *no* income from those stations. I was paying even less - about about USD$70/year - I was happy to pay double that to continue listening to music that I enjoyed, but noooooo, we couldn't possibly consider charging more.
Misguided and ill-informed on the part of BG or his advisors, sure - but well-intentioned, and the response was a bit ungracious. Perhaps something along the lines of "Thanks, but we don't really need them. Please send the chickens to country x, and we'd rather have some solar panels or well pumps, or how about some internet infrastructure for our schools?"
That's probably a different scale of funding, but BG has $$$ to spare.
No - I thought I was clear, sorry. "Nation building" in the sense of construction projects to provide fundamental services to a nation's citizens/residents, e.g. multi-lane highways and rail corridors linking major population centres, electricity grid construction from major high voltage generation and distribution stages to local domestic/manufacturing customers, telecommunications rollout such as (initially) telegraph wires & posts. Dams and water distribution pipes to take water from source to delivery. As an example, the Australian National Broadband Network (NBN). It was going to be optical fibre to (almost) every residence/business, but the sheer cost of that rollout spooked the government and they scaled it back to mostly fibre, wireless, and satellite. It's a BIG thing, a game-changer - that's what I mean by "Nation building".
And the fossil fuels industry/ies are going to die sooner or later. Fossil fuels are a finite, if large, resource - coal will probably last longer than the others but it will run out, both economically and physically. My main argument for renewables isn't based on environmental grounds, although they're pretty good grounds, it's based on the fact that energy provided by fossil fuels is cheap *at the moment*, and it won't always be that way - so it makes sense to start moving our generation and consumption towards a different model while energy is cheap. We should be able to use nuclear as well as solar and wind, etc to satisfy our demand for energy.
Can you cite any project of "nation-building" size that hasn't been massively subsidised by taxpayers? Not being snarky, I'd really like to know.
Transcontinental roads & railways, dam/waterway construction, telco and electricity grid rollouts, they've all had some sort of public funding. It seems to be the way things are done at this scale.
Those are the sort of things that I welcome my tax dollars being spent on. Don't like the corruption and greed that accompanies such a large trough of public money, but the private sector is motivated by greed, too. It seems that the choices are: public spending, with the traditional inefficiency and corruption, or private spending of public funds, with the traditional greed and corruption. Again, can you cite any private companies who have *wholly* funded projects of this size (i.e. entirely from their own sources), without latching on to the public tit to mitigate their exposure to risk?
My "how to" searches on google include a '-youtube'. Very few YT how-to videos are useful. I think YT account holders are trying to get noticed, so they'll get a slice of that sweet ad revenue.
Well, yes, but how are we to tell? Win 10 is being pushed aggressively as a free upgrade, so there's an argument there - "Microsoft have advertised widely that this is a free upgrade", fair enough. I suppose it would come down to the court's interpretation of the "Price - $0.00" on the website. If it wasn't accompanied by words like "free for a limited time", then you could argue strongly that it was a mistake. OTOH, an advertised price is an invitation to trade. They offer, you accept, they allow you to download the game, sale's finished. This sounds more like MS taking advantage of their 'right' to revoke the licence at any time.
Or will all those people who took the "free" Win 10 upgrade suddenly be presented with an inactive OS, and a demand for money?
"Sorry, it was only 'free' for the year we offered it as a free upgrade. Now you have to pay. Pity your Win 7/8 serial won't activate any more."
Slashdot Mirror
and The Angels:
No way, get fucked, fuck off.
Actually, it's the words of the audience
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
We're moving generally north, yes? So if I point my fingers southwards, I can watch my fingernails *not* catch up?
Mind=blown
As a matter of interest, how do you charge your bluetooth headphones? Plug them into a charging device, perhaps? So how does that cable/socket combo handle your rough handling? Why is it different from a 3.5 plug/socket combo?
Pity they didn't think of it before now.
Yes, that's why you have to buy a (relatively) substantial protective case if you want your super-thin smartphone to survive the contract period.
Of course, it's not such a super-slim-and-stylish fashion accessory anymore.
I was eight, watching it unfold on black & white TV, impressed because my parents told me how amazing it was, then going to school and not quite understanding just how significant the whole thing was.
We had information packs with lots of diagrams, and blocks of text with arrows all over. Info about the moon, the trajectory, the astronauts, a foldout showing the layers of the space suits, the rocket and stages, etc. Still got most of it somewhere in storage.
It was only later I found out how much involvement we in Oz had, via the Parkes radio telescope facility. I should watch "The Dish" again - it's a good film.
In no particular order, Blade Runner, Dark Star, Planet of the Apes (w/ Charlton Heston), Silent Running, Donnie Darko, Metropolis, Alien, Aliens, The Terminator, Terminator 2, The Man who fell to Earth, Solaris, Serenity (+Firefly) for starters.
They want more money. The Copyright Royalties Board decided that streaming royalties would increase, and small broadcasters' offsets would stop, and that's why Live365 closed. I was a subscriber, my favourite stations moved to different services, and I'm not going to pay each of those services to listen to 1 or 2 stations, so the net result is - artists who were getting a little bit of money from my subscription are now getting nothing.
There is still quite a large market for music. Disco balls, on the other hand.....
If there's someone out there who wants to listen to music, there's money to be made writing and performing it.
Actual printed manuals. That brings back memories...
Microprose B17 Flying Fortress on 5.25" floppies, a foldout keyboard shortcuts guide, and a printed manual about half an inch thick.
Now I'm remembering the WordPerfect 5.1 manual.
IIRC it was tested in a mission emulator on an IBM 360.
I wasn't actually "recalling" real events there - I was recalling what I read on the NASA history pages.
I decided to leave my last place of employment due to moderate depression about the circumstances, which I couldn't imagine getting any better without the immediate departure of my supervisor, lets call him B1 (classic story - a business graduate in an IT management position). I went to see my doctor to explain the situation, and he agreed I was headed for Depression Street. He wrote a letter saying I needed three weeks off (all of my accumulated sick leave). One week into that, and I delivered another letter to HR (copy to my supervisor's supervisor - call him B2), giving two weeks notice. I had no sick leave left, but they had to pay out my accumulated vacation time.
I had phone calls from B2 and B3 expressing regret about my circumstances, but they didn't offer to transfer me to another area, or anything like that. I found out later on that B1 only lasted a couple of months after I left. Too late, I had another job.
IIRC, here in Oz they have to be rated for rooftop fixtures according to the zone they're in. Where I live, we have from zero to four cyclones a year, so the panels and mounts have to meet that standard. In practice, brand-name panels are all rated to the highest (wait for it) danger zone - hail, cyclones, etc.
You need a lot of panels to power an AC compressor, plus those compressors have a huge starting surge, so you need to over-build to cope with that. Look at the specification plate of an AC compressor for the average run-time current draw, then multiply that by 4 or 5 for the startup surge. Your inverter must be able to supply that current for a second or two, plus the run-time current for hours and hours. The panels are not going to be able to do that outside the 9am-3pm window, so you need either the grid or a huge battery bank.
There are slow-start washing machine motors - is it possible to duplicate that in an AC compressor?
Small bonus - the PV panels will also shade your roof, at the cost of reduced efficiency. OTOH, I've seen plans to run water pipes along the backs of PV panels to cool them, and to pre-heat your hot water.
Unfortunately some architects focus on the aesthetics and not practicalities. We had an architect from a colder climate re-design our community centre, and he refused to put in *any* active cooling - no AC, no fans, no ducted exhaust. He seemed to think that the high ceiling with louvres at the top, and more at the bottom, would provide sufficient ventilation during summer. He even removed the existing ceiling fans because they "obscured the decorative plasterwork". When some elderly folk started fainting during performances, the committee rapidly put the fans back in.
The point is, architects don't always design for practicality, and that can become expensive later. This guy didn't do any research about about how much heat 200+ bodies generate, how much heat stage lights generate (fortunately they were recently replaced by LED units), how much worse that feels during hot and humid weather, and what's needed to pump that heat away.
Our fault for choosing him, of course - I dare say the committee was blinded by his awards.
So, 1. have the underground pipes on a slight downward angle with a drain at the lowest point, to stop pooling, and 2. use copper pipes. Better energy transfer than plastic, and microorganisms don't propagate on elemental Cu.
AC also causes condensation - on the "outside", admittedly, but it's still there, and must be dealt with, so systems are designed to mitigate. There's no reason why non-compressor systems can't also be designed to deal with it.
Sign me up!
Because if you download a song (or torrent an album, or copy a friend's CD, whatever) to keep it and listen to it more than once, you have conceded that it has value to you.
What's left is negotiation about the amount.
Unless you think that artists *owe* you their efforts?
I think the finance managers at the streaming services should re-think their strategies. Putting aside free, ad-supported playback for the moment, they seemed to think that $10 or $12 per month was a "sweet spot" - the point at which consumers were happy to pay, without frightening them off to a cheaper service. It seems obvious that wasn't enough to cope with the licencing/royalties set by the CRB.
I was a Live365 subscriber, listening to stations that *weren't* full of material by well-known artists - I like exploring music that I haven't heard before. When they emailed me late last year to say they were closing down (mainly because of a royalty rate rise that small stations couldn't afford), I told them I'd be happy to pay more. They mustn't have thought it was a viable option to survey their subscribers about raising subscription rates, because they proceeded to shut down.
Yes, $10/month *sounds* nice, but it's not very much for such a lot of choice, and now those artists who were getting *some* income from Live365 stations are getting *no* income from those stations. I was paying even less - about about USD$70/year - I was happy to pay double that to continue listening to music that I enjoyed, but noooooo, we couldn't possibly consider charging more.
Misguided and ill-informed on the part of BG or his advisors, sure - but well-intentioned, and the response was a bit ungracious. Perhaps something along the lines of "Thanks, but we don't really need them. Please send the chickens to country x, and we'd rather have some solar panels or well pumps, or how about some internet infrastructure for our schools?"
That's probably a different scale of funding, but BG has $$$ to spare.
No - I thought I was clear, sorry. "Nation building" in the sense of construction projects to provide fundamental services to a nation's citizens/residents, e.g. multi-lane highways and rail corridors linking major population centres, electricity grid construction from major high voltage generation and distribution stages to local domestic/manufacturing customers, telecommunications rollout such as (initially) telegraph wires & posts. Dams and water distribution pipes to take water from source to delivery. As an example, the Australian National Broadband Network (NBN). It was going to be optical fibre to (almost) every residence/business, but the sheer cost of that rollout spooked the government and they scaled it back to mostly fibre, wireless, and satellite. It's a BIG thing, a game-changer - that's what I mean by "Nation building".
And the fossil fuels industry/ies are going to die sooner or later. Fossil fuels are a finite, if large, resource - coal will probably last longer than the others but it will run out, both economically and physically. My main argument for renewables isn't based on environmental grounds, although they're pretty good grounds, it's based on the fact that energy provided by fossil fuels is cheap *at the moment*, and it won't always be that way - so it makes sense to start moving our generation and consumption towards a different model while energy is cheap. We should be able to use nuclear as well as solar and wind, etc to satisfy our demand for energy.
Can you cite any project of "nation-building" size that hasn't been massively subsidised by taxpayers? Not being snarky, I'd really like to know.
Transcontinental roads & railways, dam/waterway construction, telco and electricity grid rollouts, they've all had some sort of public funding. It seems to be the way things are done at this scale.
Those are the sort of things that I welcome my tax dollars being spent on. Don't like the corruption and greed that accompanies such a large trough of public money, but the private sector is motivated by greed, too. It seems that the choices are: public spending, with the traditional inefficiency and corruption, or private spending of public funds, with the traditional greed and corruption. Again, can you cite any private companies who have *wholly* funded projects of this size (i.e. entirely from their own sources), without latching on to the public tit to mitigate their exposure to risk?
My "how to" searches on google include a '-youtube'. Very few YT how-to videos are useful. I think YT account holders are trying to get noticed, so they'll get a slice of that sweet ad revenue.
Well, yes, but how are we to tell? Win 10 is being pushed aggressively as a free upgrade, so there's an argument there - "Microsoft have advertised widely that this is a free upgrade", fair enough. I suppose it would come down to the court's interpretation of the "Price - $0.00" on the website. If it wasn't accompanied by words like "free for a limited time", then you could argue strongly that it was a mistake. OTOH, an advertised price is an invitation to trade. They offer, you accept, they allow you to download the game, sale's finished. This sounds more like MS taking advantage of their 'right' to revoke the licence at any time.
Or will all those people who took the "free" Win 10 upgrade suddenly be presented with an inactive OS, and a demand for money?
"Sorry, it was only 'free' for the year we offered it as a free upgrade. Now you have to pay. Pity your Win 7/8 serial won't activate any more."
OK, *now* it's +1 Funny. Well done. I *so* wish I had mod points today.
Are you a secret 4-digit I.D.? Or does 1149581-1109409 not compute?
Lay off the triple-shot coffees, dude. It's just a discussion about Star Trek.