I grabbed an identical machine, mounted the nfs backup share and did a 'dd if=/dev/sda of=/nas/machine.img'.
Read what I posted again. I didn't say anything about not allowing reading from a mounted volume's block device. I've done that as part of disaster recovery situations on more than one occasion. What I said was that I can't contemplate a use for overwriting a partition while it is mounted, and more to the point, I'd give it about a 0.01% chance of making it through before causing a kernel panic somewhere in the filesystem code.... It's utterly nuts.
Show me a useful example in which/dev/sda comes after the "of=", please. I'm really not convinced that such an example exists. At best, the only very narrow reason would be to allow updating the partition table without booting from another volume, and even that could very trivially be incorporated into the kernel. In fact, by doing it in the kernel, you could have other sanity checks like not allowing you to change the size or position of a mounted partition but allowing unmounted partitions to be modified freely.
I agree that it doesn't matter where people drove, but you're over-thinking the allocation.
Just divide up the money by population and give occasional bonuses to tourist destinations. If you do that, you'll be pretty close to the same allocation without the fundamental invasion of every individual's privacy. Want more accurate allocation data? That's what traffic counters are for. There's no reason to believe that this will result in any improvement over the current system beyond what could be gained by requiring a simple mileage declaration.
Which brings up the obvious question: why would any OS allow a user-space tool of any kind to perform writes to a block device for a drive with mounted volumes? There's no reason in the universe for an OS to allow that to occur. Similarly, there's no reason to allow writes to the block device for any mounted partition....
And by taking away affiliate income, it is reducing the taxes paid to the state. You'd think after the first state tried this and got slapped back into its place by Amazon dropping the entire state's affiliates, no other state would be stupid enough to try it. I shudder to think what this says about the governments of Rhode Island or Hawaii.
With aluminum at about $0.86 per pound, copper at $2.31 per pound, silicon at $1.40 per pound, germanium at $1,300 per pound, arsenic at about $1,584 per pound, and gold at $8,070 per pound, you'd be crazy to not recycle PCBs. If my math is right, there's an average of almost $0.40 per motherboard just in the recovered gold alone.
As I understand it, a secondary can over as a primary only if all three primaries are down, not if only one primary goes down. So PRIM 1 not having air speed indication should have no impact on SEC 1. That said, I am not an Airbus engineer, so I'm certainly not authoritative on that. As for why Air France is suddenly concerned about replacing those tubes, AFAIK, they were in the process of doing that safety upgrade anyway. With this accident showing loss of air speed info, even if that wasn't the cause of the crash, they knew their pilots would be up in arms demanding that they speed up those upgrades.
Okay, I just found a better list of ACARS messages, and they're definitely not quite what I had read thus far. This paints a more interesting picture. The analysis, however, is wrong in a number of ways. Whoever wrote that didn't understand the formatting of the messages. For example, "34111506EFCS2
1,EFCS1,AFS,,,,,P" means that EFCS2 was reported bad by EFCS1, whereas the person who wrote up the analysis believed that this meant EFCS1 and EFCS2 were faulty. This same mistake occurs in several places. Be aware that AFAIK a single ACARS message will not indicate a failure in more than one component, so any analysis that suggests otherwise is likely a misinterpretation.:-)
In the first minute, the traffic collision avoidance system (TCAS) failed, the rudder travel limiter failed, EFCS 1 reported that it believed either that EFCS 2's pitot data (presumably coming from ADIRU 2) was bad (according to the spec) or that EFCS 2 had a power failure (according to the Airbus manuals), depending on which spec you believe.... In the same minute, EFCS 2 reported a failure of EFCS 1 because PRIM 1 had failed (don't know exactly what failed).
Two minutes later, ADIRU 1 and ADIRU 3 officially declared ADIRU 2 to be wrong. Then, ADIRU 1 and ADIRU 3 disagreed about air speed. Because ADIRU 2 was previously thrown out as nonfunctional, the computers couldn't cope and could no longer provide airspeed readings, so the pilots would have needed to check air speed against GPS and disable one of the remaining ADIRUs. In this same minute, the ISIS gyros malfunctioned, suggesting that the plane was probably slammed really, really hard. EFCS 1 also reported that EFCS 2's altitude information was also wrong (again, presumably coming from the same bad ADIRU as the faulty airspeed info from earlier). So clearly ADIRU 2 is utterly hosed at this point, but ADIRU 1 and 3 also aren't entirely in agreement, either on airspeed, I think....
One minute later, there was a fault reported in both Primary 1 and Secondary 1. In the same minute, the Auto Flight System (AFS) was reported as nonfunctional by the FMGEC. My guess is that these faults were probably caused by the pilots power cycling hardware to try to get things working.
Finally, in the last minute, the cabin pressurization system reported a fault.
The thing that is most disturbing in my mind is that the very first actual failure was an indication that the rudder limiter had failed.... Again, we're back to the rudder....
In this case, the "product"---if it can be called that---in fact was made with actual Legos. Therefore, this falls clearly into the "descriptive use" category. Calling Legos Legos cannot, by definition, be trademark identification, as it is necessary to do so in order to identify them.
You're right and wrong. If you had said that the primary flight computers are optional, you'd be right, but the computers are most certainly not optional in the Airbus FBW design according to the pilots on PPRuNe and several other sources that I consider highly reliable.
The Airbus design requires at least one of the five flight control computers to be working even for direct law (what most people would call "full manual" control). In the event that the three primary computers are down, either of the two secondaries can take over as a primary and can process the direct law commands from the controls and pass them directly on to the various control surfaces. If all five computers go down, however, IIRC, the only things you can control are the throttle and the rudder. (There's a cable that goes directly from the controls to a box that automatically engages manual rudder control if you lose all five flight control computers.) While it is possible to land a plane under ideal circumstances with just rudder control and throttle, it ain't gonna happen in a bad storm.... There is no direct connection for any other Airbus control surface, as far as I've been able to determine.
Also, the computers did NOT all go down. IIRC, two computers (PRIM1, SEC1) plus the ISIS (Integrated Standby Instruments System) modules failed. A failure in PRIM1 could be caused by a clogged pitot tube, but I don't think SEC1 should care at all about the ADIRU data. Its sole purpose is to be there in case all the primaries go down.
No, something very bizarre happened up there. My first suspect is the Kapton insulation used on the wiring. It has been implicated in two aircraft fires on the ground, and it was used in Airbus aircraft until after this particular A330 was built. If the SEC1 computer was somehow getting sporadic power surges, it's possible that it sent bad control data out to the rudder, snapping off the tail of the aircraft. It's also possible that they attempted a shutdown of a lot of the computers and ended up getting more manual control over the rudder than they bargained for. In full manual, it is completely possible to rip the tail off one of these birds by stomping the pedal too hard....
Indeed, such a tail failure was the cause of the crash of American Airlines flight 587 (an A300). A similar failure occurred in an A310, Air Transat flight 961 (the pilot somehow managed to bring that thing down in mostly one piece), and there's another report of a FedEx A300 exhibiting random tail rudder motion without the pilot pushing on the pedals and that this caused similar severe damage to the rudder. So it would not at all be hard to believe that some computer problem rips the tails off these things occasionally....
Wrong. Fair use is also a defense in trademark infringement cases. Fair use of a trademark includes things such as descriptive use, e.g. "Similar to Kleenex", use in advertising by resellers, and a whole host of other things.
Neither. You watch her surreptitiously until the police or the parents get there. You do not do anything to tip her off to the fact that she is being watched..
And if somebody does do it, I will simply argue that they are not in their right minds, and the buyers doubly so.
The biggest flaw with doing so is that cameras are the sort of thing that people throw into their bag but don't spend a lot of time thinking about. Based on the group trips I've taken and the number of people who have borrowed stuff from me, the number of people who forget the charger for their iPods, cameras, and other similar random miscellaneous gadgets seems to be somewhere around 3%. If you forget a charger for something that takes external batteries, it's easy. You get a multicharger for $20 and it will charge any batteries you throw at it. I carry one on every trip to help out all the folks who forget theirs.
Good freaking luck if you need to buy a cord that plugs into a particular device, though. Maybe if everybody moves to USB charging, it might be possible, but even then, it would take a long time to fully charge a camera battery---they're up to twice the capacity of the largest iPod/iPhone batteries.... Oh, and that 3% was not counting the number of people who suddenly realized they didn't have enough flash storage and needed more, didn't have enough battery power and needed more, etc. That's 3% just for forgotten chargers.
I think the bottom line is that photographing those moments is either important or it isn't. If it is, you carry a real camera with swappable batteries, swappable flash cards, etc. If it isn't, chances are a cell phone camera will be "good enough". I just don't see the market for cameras that are designed to take better quality pictures for people who care about photo quality but don't care if their battery runs down and they can't take photos for the rest of the day....
Converting electrical power to and from microwave radiation is an order of magnitude more efficient than solar. Also remember that the solar panels placed in space have a large surface area than the antenna, receive more solar energy per area (due to not having losses due to the ozone layer, etc), and can beam power 24/7. So imagine if the sun was 4x more powerful, and the solar panels were 80% efficient, rather than 20%. Using these (thumbnail estimate) numbers, that makes microwave 16x more efficient per unit area than solar. It becomes even more efficient when you take into account that the sun is not as bright at other times of the day (such as 8AM, or 11PM).
If the solar panels are 80% efficient in space, you can make them 80% efficient on Earth. No matter what, you've still really only made a 4x improvement over an ideal array on Earth. Now realize that the conversion to/from microwave energy is at best only 80% efficient. So now you're down to 3.2x the efficiency.
Now consider that even if you find panels that are 4 times as efficient, and even if you also got a 4x boost by putting it in space, that's still only about 320W per square foot. 200 MW of power would require 625,000 square feet, or about 14 acres. High estimates for per-satellite energy production are only 4.8 MW per satellite. This means launching 42 satellites to get 200 MW. At a low estimate of $50 million per launch, this comes out to $2.1 billion. With new panels at $1 per watt, the launch costs alone this would buy 2.1 GW on Earth, more than two orders of magnitude more power per dollar. That's not even counting the cost of the equipment, the insane costs of maintenance, etc. Even NASA's best-case estimates (if I read them correctly) put the price of space solar at about $3 per Watt, which is a significant premium over ground-based solar.
Worse, they almost certainly can't use any of the desirable lower frequency bands without causing harmful interference, so we can assume they'll be way up there (15+ GHz). At higher frequencies, the atmosphere itself starts to be a serious problem. At least ground stations still produce a decent fraction of their power in cloudy weather. Satellite? Oops. We have a cumulonimbus cloud in the way. There went 60 dB. That 4 MW station now produces only 4W.
I'd like to use the phrase "not enough crack in the world" for this plan. It looks to me like PG&E is looking for ways to blow huge amounts of money on solar power so that they can turn around and say "See, look, we tried it. Solar isn't practical," and then go back to shafting the public with absurdly inflated power and gas prices.
SLRs like the D40 don't use nearly as much battery power as their point-and-shoot counterparts because they don't have a zoom motor. Also, I'd imagine you don't use your flash constantly like many amateurs do, either.
That said, even with my DSLR, I have multiple batteries for two reasons: 1. I can drain a battery in 2-3 days of heavy vacation shooting if I'm with a large group. 2. It's easier on the batteries if you run them all the way down and charge them rather than topping them up every night.
I disagree. If you're at all serious about taking photos, AA batteries won't last very long. Standard AA batteries have about 2/3rds the mAh capacity of the lithium ion cells used in most cameras, and at a much lower voltage. You would need four AA batteries to last as long as one fully charged pack. Multiply this times the $5 most tourist places charge for a 4-pack of AAs, and that's potentially adding $100 to your two-week trip.
It is far better to keep two spare lithium cells charged up and in your bag along with the camera. When your battery runs down, put it in your pocket instead of putting it back in the bag. When you empty out your pockets, you now remember that you need to charge up the battery. And if you forget to pack it up when you get done charging it, that's not a problem because you have a second spare; when you run down a second one, you'll be forced to take the charged one off the charger to charge that one, so you'd have to really screw up to not have a spare charged battery with you. And if you use third-party batteries, those two spares will cost you less than half what it would cost for one trip worth of AA batteries....
Yeah. There's even a citation for it in the Wikipedia page on M-M. It's section 2302, paragraph (c).
(c) Prohibition on conditions for written or implied warranty; waiver by Commission
No warrantor of a consumer product may condition his written or implied warranty of such product on the consumer's using, in connection with such product, any article or service (other than article or service provided without charge under the terms of the warranty) which is identified by brand, trade, or corporate name; except that the prohibition of this subsection may be waived by the Commission if--
(1) the warrantor satisfies the Commission that the warranted product will function properly only if the article or service so identified is used in connection with the warranted product, and
(2) the Commission finds that such a waiver is in the public interest.
The Commission shall identify in the Federal Register, and permit public comment on, all applications for waiver of the prohibition of this subsection, and shall publish in the Federal Register its disposition of any such application, including the reasons therefor.
An electric shaver is not like a camera. Nobody ever lost a once-in-al-lifetime chance to take a photograph because they weren't clean-shaven. And manual backups almost invariably exist for electric razors. And you leave your electric razor plugged in at night and only use it once a day. What makes sense for such a limited-use device does not make sense for a camera that you carry around all day and use repeatedly throughout the day. For a camera, running out of battery power is annoying, but running out of battery power on a device that doesn't have removable batteries is a crisis.
At least in the United States, a manufacturer is not legally allowed to void a warranty for the use of third-party products unless they can show that the third party product caused the damage involved in the warranty claim... not that it can cause damage, but that it did cause damage. So no, they cannot detect the battery and invalidate the warranty. Doing so would put them in violation of Magnuson-Moss.
How to ensure that you won't sell a single camera ever again:
Build the battery into the camera.
There is no step 2!
Have you ever known anyone who buys a camera who doesn't immediately turn around and buy a second battery? I've never owned a camera, camcorder, etc. without having at least two batteries for the thing. When your battery runs down on a camera, you want to be able to drop in a new one, not lose the ability to capture memories until you can go back to the hotel and charge up for three hours. I'm pretty sure cameras with built-in batteries would be an absolute nonstarter for a sizable percentage of consumers. At best, they'd buy one once, then the first time they got screwed by it, vow to never buy that manufacturer's products again. Either way, it isn't conducive to long-term sales and profitability.
Mod parent up. Assuming that the linked article is correct, this recent find is at least 8,000 years newer than the oldest known flute, and possibly as much as 47,000 years newer. Of course, this may be the oldest definitively dated flute.
What is fascinating about this is that it gives you just how far back primitive man was creating complex artistic works. I'm sure there are other instruments of similar vintage---drums and the like---though they may not have survived the years since. The funny part will be when scientists discover that they've underestimated the age of the xylophone family by the better part of a million years.:-) I mean really, if something requiring as much carving as a flute goes back 80,000 years, how absurd is it to believe that something as simple as a bunch of sticks cut to different lengths only goes back to 2,000 B.C.?
With the exception of the part where you said their output decreases over time, that's simply not true. Most of the current generation of solar panels guarantee a minimum of 80-85% output after 25-30 years, depending on manufacturer. That's in the warranty for the panels. If they fall below that level within 25-30 years, you get new panels. The effective lifespan before they produce no power at all is probably 100+ years, though most people would replace them with more efficient panels well before that time....
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Read what I posted again. I didn't say anything about not allowing reading from a mounted volume's block device. I've done that as part of disaster recovery situations on more than one occasion. What I said was that I can't contemplate a use for overwriting a partition while it is mounted, and more to the point, I'd give it about a 0.01% chance of making it through before causing a kernel panic somewhere in the filesystem code.... It's utterly nuts.
Show me a useful example in which /dev/sda comes after the "of=", please. I'm really not convinced that such an example exists. At best, the only very narrow reason would be to allow updating the partition table without booting from another volume, and even that could very trivially be incorporated into the kernel. In fact, by doing it in the kernel, you could have other sanity checks like not allowing you to change the size or position of a mounted partition but allowing unmounted partitions to be modified freely.
I agree that it doesn't matter where people drove, but you're over-thinking the allocation.
Just divide up the money by population and give occasional bonuses to tourist destinations. If you do that, you'll be pretty close to the same allocation without the fundamental invasion of every individual's privacy. Want more accurate allocation data? That's what traffic counters are for. There's no reason to believe that this will result in any improvement over the current system beyond what could be gained by requiring a simple mileage declaration.
Which brings up the obvious question: why would any OS allow a user-space tool of any kind to perform writes to a block device for a drive with mounted volumes? There's no reason in the universe for an OS to allow that to occur. Similarly, there's no reason to allow writes to the block device for any mounted partition....
And by taking away affiliate income, it is reducing the taxes paid to the state. You'd think after the first state tried this and got slapped back into its place by Amazon dropping the entire state's affiliates, no other state would be stupid enough to try it. I shudder to think what this says about the governments of Rhode Island or Hawaii.
With aluminum at about $0.86 per pound, copper at $2.31 per pound, silicon at $1.40 per pound, germanium at $1,300 per pound, arsenic at about $1,584 per pound, and gold at $8,070 per pound, you'd be crazy to not recycle PCBs. If my math is right, there's an average of almost $0.40 per motherboard just in the recovered gold alone.
As I understand it, a secondary can over as a primary only if all three primaries are down, not if only one primary goes down. So PRIM 1 not having air speed indication should have no impact on SEC 1. That said, I am not an Airbus engineer, so I'm certainly not authoritative on that. As for why Air France is suddenly concerned about replacing those tubes, AFAIK, they were in the process of doing that safety upgrade anyway. With this accident showing loss of air speed info, even if that wasn't the cause of the crash, they knew their pilots would be up in arms demanding that they speed up those upgrades.
Okay, I just found a better list of ACARS messages, and they're definitely not quite what I had read thus far. This paints a more interesting picture. The analysis, however, is wrong in a number of ways. Whoever wrote that didn't understand the formatting of the messages. For example, "34111506EFCS2 1,EFCS1,AFS,,,,,P" means that EFCS2 was reported bad by EFCS1, whereas the person who wrote up the analysis believed that this meant EFCS1 and EFCS2 were faulty. This same mistake occurs in several places. Be aware that AFAIK a single ACARS message will not indicate a failure in more than one component, so any analysis that suggests otherwise is likely a misinterpretation. :-)
In the first minute, the traffic collision avoidance system (TCAS) failed, the rudder travel limiter failed, EFCS 1 reported that it believed either that EFCS 2's pitot data (presumably coming from ADIRU 2) was bad (according to the spec) or that EFCS 2 had a power failure (according to the Airbus manuals), depending on which spec you believe.... In the same minute, EFCS 2 reported a failure of EFCS 1 because PRIM 1 had failed (don't know exactly what failed).
Two minutes later, ADIRU 1 and ADIRU 3 officially declared ADIRU 2 to be wrong. Then, ADIRU 1 and ADIRU 3 disagreed about air speed. Because ADIRU 2 was previously thrown out as nonfunctional, the computers couldn't cope and could no longer provide airspeed readings, so the pilots would have needed to check air speed against GPS and disable one of the remaining ADIRUs. In this same minute, the ISIS gyros malfunctioned, suggesting that the plane was probably slammed really, really hard. EFCS 1 also reported that EFCS 2's altitude information was also wrong (again, presumably coming from the same bad ADIRU as the faulty airspeed info from earlier). So clearly ADIRU 2 is utterly hosed at this point, but ADIRU 1 and 3 also aren't entirely in agreement, either on airspeed, I think....
One minute later, there was a fault reported in both Primary 1 and Secondary 1. In the same minute, the Auto Flight System (AFS) was reported as nonfunctional by the FMGEC. My guess is that these faults were probably caused by the pilots power cycling hardware to try to get things working.
Finally, in the last minute, the cabin pressurization system reported a fault.
The thing that is most disturbing in my mind is that the very first actual failure was an indication that the rudder limiter had failed.... Again, we're back to the rudder....
In this case, the "product"---if it can be called that---in fact was made with actual Legos. Therefore, this falls clearly into the "descriptive use" category. Calling Legos Legos cannot, by definition, be trademark identification, as it is necessary to do so in order to identify them.
You're right and wrong. If you had said that the primary flight computers are optional, you'd be right, but the computers are most certainly not optional in the Airbus FBW design according to the pilots on PPRuNe and several other sources that I consider highly reliable.
The Airbus design requires at least one of the five flight control computers to be working even for direct law (what most people would call "full manual" control). In the event that the three primary computers are down, either of the two secondaries can take over as a primary and can process the direct law commands from the controls and pass them directly on to the various control surfaces. If all five computers go down, however, IIRC, the only things you can control are the throttle and the rudder. (There's a cable that goes directly from the controls to a box that automatically engages manual rudder control if you lose all five flight control computers.) While it is possible to land a plane under ideal circumstances with just rudder control and throttle, it ain't gonna happen in a bad storm.... There is no direct connection for any other Airbus control surface, as far as I've been able to determine.
Also, the computers did NOT all go down. IIRC, two computers (PRIM1, SEC1) plus the ISIS (Integrated Standby Instruments System) modules failed. A failure in PRIM1 could be caused by a clogged pitot tube, but I don't think SEC1 should care at all about the ADIRU data. Its sole purpose is to be there in case all the primaries go down.
No, something very bizarre happened up there. My first suspect is the Kapton insulation used on the wiring. It has been implicated in two aircraft fires on the ground, and it was used in Airbus aircraft until after this particular A330 was built. If the SEC1 computer was somehow getting sporadic power surges, it's possible that it sent bad control data out to the rudder, snapping off the tail of the aircraft. It's also possible that they attempted a shutdown of a lot of the computers and ended up getting more manual control over the rudder than they bargained for. In full manual, it is completely possible to rip the tail off one of these birds by stomping the pedal too hard....
Indeed, such a tail failure was the cause of the crash of American Airlines flight 587 (an A300). A similar failure occurred in an A310, Air Transat flight 961 (the pilot somehow managed to bring that thing down in mostly one piece), and there's another report of a FedEx A300 exhibiting random tail rudder motion without the pilot pushing on the pedals and that this caused similar severe damage to the rudder. So it would not at all be hard to believe that some computer problem rips the tails off these things occasionally....
Wrong. Fair use is also a defense in trademark infringement cases. Fair use of a trademark includes things such as descriptive use, e.g. "Similar to Kleenex", use in advertising by resellers, and a whole host of other things.
The article Fair Use of Trademarks is a good read on the subject.
Neither. You watch her surreptitiously until the police or the parents get there. You do not do anything to tip her off to the fact that she is being watched..
And if somebody does do it, I will simply argue that they are not in their right minds, and the buyers doubly so.
The biggest flaw with doing so is that cameras are the sort of thing that people throw into their bag but don't spend a lot of time thinking about. Based on the group trips I've taken and the number of people who have borrowed stuff from me, the number of people who forget the charger for their iPods, cameras, and other similar random miscellaneous gadgets seems to be somewhere around 3%. If you forget a charger for something that takes external batteries, it's easy. You get a multicharger for $20 and it will charge any batteries you throw at it. I carry one on every trip to help out all the folks who forget theirs.
Good freaking luck if you need to buy a cord that plugs into a particular device, though. Maybe if everybody moves to USB charging, it might be possible, but even then, it would take a long time to fully charge a camera battery---they're up to twice the capacity of the largest iPod/iPhone batteries.... Oh, and that 3% was not counting the number of people who suddenly realized they didn't have enough flash storage and needed more, didn't have enough battery power and needed more, etc. That's 3% just for forgotten chargers.
I think the bottom line is that photographing those moments is either important or it isn't. If it is, you carry a real camera with swappable batteries, swappable flash cards, etc. If it isn't, chances are a cell phone camera will be "good enough". I just don't see the market for cameras that are designed to take better quality pictures for people who care about photo quality but don't care if their battery runs down and they can't take photos for the rest of the day....
If the solar panels are 80% efficient in space, you can make them 80% efficient on Earth. No matter what, you've still really only made a 4x improvement over an ideal array on Earth. Now realize that the conversion to/from microwave energy is at best only 80% efficient. So now you're down to 3.2x the efficiency.
Now consider that even if you find panels that are 4 times as efficient, and even if you also got a 4x boost by putting it in space, that's still only about 320W per square foot. 200 MW of power would require 625,000 square feet, or about 14 acres. High estimates for per-satellite energy production are only 4.8 MW per satellite. This means launching 42 satellites to get 200 MW. At a low estimate of $50 million per launch, this comes out to $2.1 billion. With new panels at $1 per watt, the launch costs alone this would buy 2.1 GW on Earth, more than two orders of magnitude more power per dollar. That's not even counting the cost of the equipment, the insane costs of maintenance, etc. Even NASA's best-case estimates (if I read them correctly) put the price of space solar at about $3 per Watt, which is a significant premium over ground-based solar.
Worse, they almost certainly can't use any of the desirable lower frequency bands without causing harmful interference, so we can assume they'll be way up there (15+ GHz). At higher frequencies, the atmosphere itself starts to be a serious problem. At least ground stations still produce a decent fraction of their power in cloudy weather. Satellite? Oops. We have a cumulonimbus cloud in the way. There went 60 dB. That 4 MW station now produces only 4W.
I'd like to use the phrase "not enough crack in the world" for this plan. It looks to me like PG&E is looking for ways to blow huge amounts of money on solar power so that they can turn around and say "See, look, we tried it. Solar isn't practical," and then go back to shafting the public with absurdly inflated power and gas prices.
SLRs like the D40 don't use nearly as much battery power as their point-and-shoot counterparts because they don't have a zoom motor. Also, I'd imagine you don't use your flash constantly like many amateurs do, either.
That said, even with my DSLR, I have multiple batteries for two reasons: 1. I can drain a battery in 2-3 days of heavy vacation shooting if I'm with a large group. 2. It's easier on the batteries if you run them all the way down and charge them rather than topping them up every night.
I disagree. If you're at all serious about taking photos, AA batteries won't last very long. Standard AA batteries have about 2/3rds the mAh capacity of the lithium ion cells used in most cameras, and at a much lower voltage. You would need four AA batteries to last as long as one fully charged pack. Multiply this times the $5 most tourist places charge for a 4-pack of AAs, and that's potentially adding $100 to your two-week trip.
It is far better to keep two spare lithium cells charged up and in your bag along with the camera. When your battery runs down, put it in your pocket instead of putting it back in the bag. When you empty out your pockets, you now remember that you need to charge up the battery. And if you forget to pack it up when you get done charging it, that's not a problem because you have a second spare; when you run down a second one, you'll be forced to take the charged one off the charger to charge that one, so you'd have to really screw up to not have a spare charged battery with you. And if you use third-party batteries, those two spares will cost you less than half what it would cost for one trip worth of AA batteries....
The QuickTake also used standard AA batteries.
A cell phone that can take photos. In terms of power usage, there are four huge differences between a cell phone camera and a point-and-shoot:
Nobody in their right minds would put non-removable batteries in a camera with a flash, much less in a camera with an electromechanical zoom.
Apple doesn't make cameras.
Yeah. There's even a citation for it in the Wikipedia page on M-M. It's section 2302, paragraph (c).
An electric shaver is not like a camera. Nobody ever lost a once-in-al-lifetime chance to take a photograph because they weren't clean-shaven. And manual backups almost invariably exist for electric razors. And you leave your electric razor plugged in at night and only use it once a day. What makes sense for such a limited-use device does not make sense for a camera that you carry around all day and use repeatedly throughout the day. For a camera, running out of battery power is annoying, but running out of battery power on a device that doesn't have removable batteries is a crisis.
At least in the United States, a manufacturer is not legally allowed to void a warranty for the use of third-party products unless they can show that the third party product caused the damage involved in the warranty claim... not that it can cause damage, but that it did cause damage. So no, they cannot detect the battery and invalidate the warranty. Doing so would put them in violation of Magnuson-Moss.
How to ensure that you won't sell a single camera ever again:
Have you ever known anyone who buys a camera who doesn't immediately turn around and buy a second battery? I've never owned a camera, camcorder, etc. without having at least two batteries for the thing. When your battery runs down on a camera, you want to be able to drop in a new one, not lose the ability to capture memories until you can go back to the hotel and charge up for three hours. I'm pretty sure cameras with built-in batteries would be an absolute nonstarter for a sizable percentage of consumers. At best, they'd buy one once, then the first time they got screwed by it, vow to never buy that manufacturer's products again. Either way, it isn't conducive to long-term sales and profitability.
Err... gives you an idea of just how far back....
Mod parent up. Assuming that the linked article is correct, this recent find is at least 8,000 years newer than the oldest known flute, and possibly as much as 47,000 years newer. Of course, this may be the oldest definitively dated flute.
What is fascinating about this is that it gives you just how far back primitive man was creating complex artistic works. I'm sure there are other instruments of similar vintage---drums and the like---though they may not have survived the years since. The funny part will be when scientists discover that they've underestimated the age of the xylophone family by the better part of a million years. :-) I mean really, if something requiring as much carving as a flute goes back 80,000 years, how absurd is it to believe that something as simple as a bunch of sticks cut to different lengths only goes back to 2,000 B.C.?
With the exception of the part where you said their output decreases over time, that's simply not true. Most of the current generation of solar panels guarantee a minimum of 80-85% output after 25-30 years, depending on manufacturer. That's in the warranty for the panels. If they fall below that level within 25-30 years, you get new panels. The effective lifespan before they produce no power at all is probably 100+ years, though most people would replace them with more efficient panels well before that time....
I assume they give you the negatives with that CD, since you get them for free as part of the developing process.