Kind of like the mob. "Hey Tony take the fall on this rather than admit is a rico offense and rat me out. It would be VERY good for you and your family if you do that":-)
A lot of the times harassment is hard to prove and I'm sure if you make things a pain for your coworkers they'll find a way to pick on you even if it is giving you the crap assignments permanently. "Oh you do such a good job in syringe alley we are promoting you to syringe enforcement officer and permanently stationing you there":-)
Nice link. Not so sure about how accurately it conveys information though. For example africa has ~50% more population than europe but europe looks "redder" even trying to mentally correct for its smaller area. Of south US I was thinking more of Texas, New Mexico etc. I didn't realize how much the more eastern states at the same latitude or below up the density though, especially Florida.
I looked for some figures and all I found was that ~80% of people live in the northern hemisphere but also 2/3rds of the land mass. The challenge is always distribution people want power were their is population but for pretty much all conventional generation methods at least people would rather not have the power plant next door (whether coal,nuke, oil etc). Solar is a bit nicer but I still run into a lot of people that worry about them on the roofs: will they blow off like shingles, will they make your roof fail, will it be a pain to move them when you need to redo your roof etc. Solar farms would be nice but to have the land you need to be somewhere less dense which will likely be pretty far from the major urban centres were the majority of people will be living.
Seeing as I'm not a yank I think I know a bit of other geography, and definitely other geography better than Yankistan.
Lots of places with really large parking lots though (think mall. You could run wires everywhere (underground?) or you could not need to pass the lanes and just find a draw locally. Yeah you're right electric is rare at the moment. Free power everywhere you park would be a nice incentive program though. Good for the companies as they can say they promote green and draw people. Good for the electric car purchaser as it is a "free" tank of gas.
Couldn't it just be the presumably DC "gas pump" part of things and not the box, convert to DC bit? Ie just a wire going into the car like it does now after it has been converted to DC. You'd have the DC part of the system powered both by DC from the panels and DC via the AC/DC converter from the normal way similar to a computer getting fed from a UPS mixed mode as long as the wire going to the box has the right type you're golden.
Elmer Fudd comes out and says "Tony you been warry warry baddd".
Seriously oral reprimand? Something like "hey dumbass you just cost us two years of your wages". The sad think is it is the public's money that is going to be used to pay this. So you pay for a police officer, he pisses on a citizens rights then you tax the public some more to pay off for the damage you did. Nice.
To be nutty green they could feed it into electronic car changing, not conversion of the solar output to AC necessary since the batteries ultimately end up taking DC from the chargers AFAIK. One parking space worth of panels wouldn't be enough to recharge a car but all the spaces in a row could be used. Sort of like a declining feed in tarrif: electric drivers get free power for their car until more and more people drive electric (splitting up the number of spaces worth of panels per electric vehicle) until eventually everyone has to pay for all (other than one spaces worth of solar generation) of their cars charging. At which point hopefully the cost of both solar and electric batteries is low enough that you are still better off.
So build roofs over what would otherwise be open land parking lots? Not a bad option I wonder what the net effect would be on a summer day. You'd create shade but you'd also have a black roof overhead that by definition is designed to absorb light. Depending how dense the panels are installed you might have to run lights for your parking garage versus ~ free lighting from the sun in an open parking lot.
Tilt stands on roofs are used more for people who don't have a sun facing roof though right? I suppose they might also get the angle of the panels closer to normal to the sun on average but you wouldn't be tracking the sun throughout the day right? Are they limited to areas with nice weather? The only panels I see around my area are low set to prevent wind/snow issues in the winter (80kph winds with 1m snow might not be so great for a panel on a tilt).
Neat idea. You'd still need to be able to tilt up and down too to account for the suns position changing with the seasons but that is a much more simple solution I think (just get someone out there to give it a nudge every month or so). Ground based solar has it pros and cons: good you can track the sun so get a bunch more power but you are tying up what otherwise might have been useful land (or alternatively have them in the middle of nowhere and have a distribution problem). Rooftop solar is nice because it uses something in a way that doesn't prevent the land from being used and is by definition in proximity to a location where power is needed. But less efficient. What we really need is solar windmills:-)
I think the reason is more political. Hate crimes are something that "somone (government) should do something about". It is much easier to get the gay, minority, women etc vote by saying "We're telling courts to come down especially hard on people that hurt you" than just saying "we'll enforce the laws if someone assaults you". Special interests want to be treated as special.
Another fun one of mine is affirmative action. I have a friend that got into university even though she had too low of an average. The school counselor told her she got in because she enabled them to tick off 3 boxes (minority, women, and from out of province) rather than because of her abilities. The funny thing is ticking multiple boxes with the same person could lead to less diversity as people will tend to have multiple "strikes aganist" them that get in for that reason. All poor, minority women from out of province with a learning disability and the rest white guys:-) There shouldn't be any incentive for women anymore even if you agree with quotas in university anyways since they are now the majority of students (as are minorities at least in the schools I've gone too).
Like the rock you hide under you anonymous coward? Do you honestly think that anti-discrimination laws are never imposed just under the assumption that it must have happened because of the person being a minority since the person was a minority (or in the case of women a majority but with discrimination in their past)?
Canada is bad in general when it comes to victims rights to defend themselves. You have to be very careful walking the line between justifiable force and assault. Hitting someone in self defence might be justified but if you are big and well trained like I am and hit someone and their nose breaks, oh it must have been excessive force since obviously he's bigger and knows what he's doing the fact that the other guys nose sticks out like a punching bag had nothing to do with it.
Admittedly hearsay but I had a friend with a friend that got charged with a hate crime in Canada. He was getting mugged. He punched the guy in the face and ran away. But the guy mugging him was arab, so it was automatically a hate crime with a triple sentence from what he would have gotten if it was just a white guy. My answer to the court would have been "yeah I hated him that bastard was trying to rob me"... I probably wouldn't have had a good outcome either;-)
Just goes to show you while Boston has Harvard, MIT and other good schools there are still dumb ideas in the city and in those schools:-) I guess stupidity obeys diffusion too:-)
Umm, no southern isn't southern US southern is south of the equator. While I'll give it to you that there are less people in the southern hemisphere there still is ~800M people and the land mass is much smaller (less than half), and about 20% of that is Antarctica (which presumably wouldn't be solar accessible anyways because it is in the polar region), so more dense than you'd expect I think. But still less than the northern hemisphere of course and they probably would just tear down some more rainforest rather than spend a stupidly large amount per sqm of solar panels.
Haha. It is the three dimensional aspect i think. A ~2d panel only has a crossectional area proportional to the sin of the incident angle (and the panels are less efficient for oblique light too). Extending into 3D means the panels have approx the same crossectional area regardless of the suns angle in the sky. That said: way too much hardware involved. I have solar on my roof and on a clear day in the winter I get about 40% of the power as a clear day in the summer. But that only needs one panel. Getting 20X the panels to get that extra 60% of the power doesn't make sense to me. Just put the suckers on the ground with a tilt-able stand.
I agree about shadow effects. More comes into play though since more angles will be approximately normal to the panels more angles of light will still be in an effective region of the panel for collecting. In winter in the non-tropical regions the sun's maximum height can be pretty low in the sky giving you a very oblique angle to fixed panels against a roof (assuming a shallow slope on the roof). Making these suckers stick up means that the crossection exposed to the sun is larger even if the sun is lower in the sky.
That said two problems I see:
1) Roof top intallation will be weight. I have panels on my roof and they are about 100lb per sq yard. Stack twenty together and you'd be looking at 2000lb per sq yard. Not a good thing for the roof.
2) Ground based panels: you can put the panels on stands that can be adjusted, heck they can be motorized so they can track the sun through the day AND through the seasons. So why exactly would you by ~20X more panels (at about 200 a pop) when a $50 motor per panel (guessing), or an adjustable stand that someone goes out and tilts every month or so can have the same affect?
Sold about 20M more units but from what I've read in Business Week I think it was a few months ago the problem is in game sales. Those casual gamers tend to by a few games and then stop. XBox and PS3 gamers tend to by a few games a quarter. Wii has a lot of add ons too but I suspect XBox with Kinect and its higher initial price probably makes the hardware sales a wash but they sell more games.
A bigger issue might be Kinect: maybe they don't have a new piece of hardware available yet and don't want to get caught being the company that releases the same accessory as the previous console confusing the argument for upgrading. They might end up coming out with it integrated in the console I suspect.
Exactly, we continue to expand the things that are fixable but there is always more. As people live longer they live long enough to have different problems. So today's #1 cancer gets cured only to have the population live another 5 years to die of some weird heart problem. We fix that and all of a sudden the #1 killer is skin cancer say, fix that then it becomes pneumonia. It is a game of wack a mole which by definition we'll never win since we all need to die.
There is too many ways of getting disabled. Amputated limbs okay, but how much leg is left? If it is past the knee you might be okay but what if it is mid femur? What if it is neurological? Again how far up is the neurological problem? Are you a quadropeligic or is it just a local nerve in the leg? Do you have a degenerative neural disease so even your currently working nerves are weird? Too many variables I think an expanding portion of people will be candidates but I don't think we'll ever get everyone. I'm sorry sometimes the most reasonable thing to tell little Timmy is that he'll never walk again, and no really he'll never walk again. There isn't some miracle just around the corner etc. medicine tries too much to give hope to the hopeless it is becoming more of a religion every day. Same thing happens in cancer were I work.
Oh cancer will be cured in 20 years, yeah we've been hearing that since cancer was discovered. There is too many ways that your cells can go bad. Too many regions of the body, too many where cancers are really close to the normal tissues etc. We'll cure some, we'll prevent some, but there will always be cancer of one form or another and we need it: mutations are necessary for evolution.
I haven't used it on Win 7 just win XP at work. It works good enough I can live with it but I find it a little flaky. For example only the first (the one you start up with) seems to respond to the windows key. So Win-E opens win explorer but only on the first desktop. What that means in practice is I use two desktops, one gets my email, and work messaging stuff that is always open but I don't want distracting me. The other is my "working" desktop that all the shortcuts work on so that I can do things quickly.
Another "feature" whether good or bad: notifications only go to the desktop with the app on it. So for example Outlook notifications only get seen if you are on that desktop. I actually like that since that means I can decide when I want to see an email rather than get distracted every couple minutes by yet another all users email that has nothing to do with me.
Lastly, and this is painful, occasionally the mouse moves to the top right when you click (rare, but still happens every couple days). What this means is assuming you have a window maximized, occasionally you'll try to click on something and instead you'll end up closing whatever window was in that position in the screen. A bit of a piss off but infrequent enough I live with it.
Perhaps some of these things are not in win 7 land I'm not sure. At home I got a 27" screen so I'm not too concerned with screen real estate:-)
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Kind of like the mob. "Hey Tony take the fall on this rather than admit is a rico offense and rat me out. It would be VERY good for you and your family if you do that" :-)
A lot of the times harassment is hard to prove and I'm sure if you make things a pain for your coworkers they'll find a way to pick on you even if it is giving you the crap assignments permanently. "Oh you do such a good job in syringe alley we are promoting you to syringe enforcement officer and permanently stationing you there" :-)
Nice link. Not so sure about how accurately it conveys information though. For example africa has ~50% more population than europe but europe looks "redder" even trying to mentally correct for its smaller area. Of south US I was thinking more of Texas, New Mexico etc. I didn't realize how much the more eastern states at the same latitude or below up the density though, especially Florida.
I looked for some figures and all I found was that ~80% of people live in the northern hemisphere but also 2/3rds of the land mass. The challenge is always distribution people want power were their is population but for pretty much all conventional generation methods at least people would rather not have the power plant next door (whether coal,nuke, oil etc). Solar is a bit nicer but I still run into a lot of people that worry about them on the roofs: will they blow off like shingles, will they make your roof fail, will it be a pain to move them when you need to redo your roof etc. Solar farms would be nice but to have the land you need to be somewhere less dense which will likely be pretty far from the major urban centres were the majority of people will be living.
Seeing as I'm not a yank I think I know a bit of other geography, and definitely other geography better than Yankistan.
Lots of places with really large parking lots though (think mall. You could run wires everywhere (underground?) or you could not need to pass the lanes and just find a draw locally. Yeah you're right electric is rare at the moment. Free power everywhere you park would be a nice incentive program though. Good for the companies as they can say they promote green and draw people. Good for the electric car purchaser as it is a "free" tank of gas.
Couldn't it just be the presumably DC "gas pump" part of things and not the box, convert to DC bit? Ie just a wire going into the car like it does now after it has been converted to DC. You'd have the DC part of the system powered both by DC from the panels and DC via the AC/DC converter from the normal way similar to a computer getting fed from a UPS mixed mode as long as the wire going to the box has the right type you're golden.
Elmer Fudd comes out and says "Tony you been warry warry baddd".
Seriously oral reprimand? Something like "hey dumbass you just cost us two years of your wages". The sad think is it is the public's money that is going to be used to pay this. So you pay for a police officer, he pisses on a citizens rights then you tax the public some more to pay off for the damage you did. Nice.
To be nutty green they could feed it into electronic car changing, not conversion of the solar output to AC necessary since the batteries ultimately end up taking DC from the chargers AFAIK. One parking space worth of panels wouldn't be enough to recharge a car but all the spaces in a row could be used. Sort of like a declining feed in tarrif: electric drivers get free power for their car until more and more people drive electric (splitting up the number of spaces worth of panels per electric vehicle) until eventually everyone has to pay for all (other than one spaces worth of solar generation) of their cars charging. At which point hopefully the cost of both solar and electric batteries is low enough that you are still better off.
So build roofs over what would otherwise be open land parking lots? Not a bad option I wonder what the net effect would be on a summer day. You'd create shade but you'd also have a black roof overhead that by definition is designed to absorb light. Depending how dense the panels are installed you might have to run lights for your parking garage versus ~ free lighting from the sun in an open parking lot.
Tilt stands on roofs are used more for people who don't have a sun facing roof though right? I suppose they might also get the angle of the panels closer to normal to the sun on average but you wouldn't be tracking the sun throughout the day right? Are they limited to areas with nice weather? The only panels I see around my area are low set to prevent wind/snow issues in the winter (80kph winds with 1m snow might not be so great for a panel on a tilt).
Neat idea. You'd still need to be able to tilt up and down too to account for the suns position changing with the seasons but that is a much more simple solution I think (just get someone out there to give it a nudge every month or so). Ground based solar has it pros and cons: good you can track the sun so get a bunch more power but you are tying up what otherwise might have been useful land (or alternatively have them in the middle of nowhere and have a distribution problem). Rooftop solar is nice because it uses something in a way that doesn't prevent the land from being used and is by definition in proximity to a location where power is needed. But less efficient. What we really need is solar windmills :-)
I think the reason is more political. Hate crimes are something that "somone (government) should do something about". It is much easier to get the gay, minority, women etc vote by saying "We're telling courts to come down especially hard on people that hurt you" than just saying "we'll enforce the laws if someone assaults you". Special interests want to be treated as special.
Another fun one of mine is affirmative action. I have a friend that got into university even though she had too low of an average. The school counselor told her she got in because she enabled them to tick off 3 boxes (minority, women, and from out of province) rather than because of her abilities. The funny thing is ticking multiple boxes with the same person could lead to less diversity as people will tend to have multiple "strikes aganist" them that get in for that reason. All poor, minority women from out of province with a learning disability and the rest white guys :-) There shouldn't be any incentive for women anymore even if you agree with quotas in university anyways since they are now the majority of students (as are minorities at least in the schools I've gone too).
Like the rock you hide under you anonymous coward? Do you honestly think that anti-discrimination laws are never imposed just under the assumption that it must have happened because of the person being a minority since the person was a minority (or in the case of women a majority but with discrimination in their past)?
Canada is bad in general when it comes to victims rights to defend themselves. You have to be very careful walking the line between justifiable force and assault. Hitting someone in self defence might be justified but if you are big and well trained like I am and hit someone and their nose breaks, oh it must have been excessive force since obviously he's bigger and knows what he's doing the fact that the other guys nose sticks out like a punching bag had nothing to do with it.
Admittedly hearsay but I had a friend with a friend that got charged with a hate crime in Canada. He was getting mugged. He punched the guy in the face and ran away. But the guy mugging him was arab, so it was automatically a hate crime with a triple sentence from what he would have gotten if it was just a white guy. My answer to the court would have been "yeah I hated him that bastard was trying to rob me" ... I probably wouldn't have had a good outcome either ;-)
Just goes to show you while Boston has Harvard, MIT and other good schools there are still dumb ideas in the city and in those schools :-) I guess stupidity obeys diffusion too :-)
Umm, no southern isn't southern US southern is south of the equator. While I'll give it to you that there are less people in the southern hemisphere there still is ~800M people and the land mass is much smaller (less than half), and about 20% of that is Antarctica (which presumably wouldn't be solar accessible anyways because it is in the polar region), so more dense than you'd expect I think. But still less than the northern hemisphere of course and they probably would just tear down some more rainforest rather than spend a stupidly large amount per sqm of solar panels.
Haha. It is the three dimensional aspect i think. A ~2d panel only has a crossectional area proportional to the sin of the incident angle (and the panels are less efficient for oblique light too). Extending into 3D means the panels have approx the same crossectional area regardless of the suns angle in the sky. That said: way too much hardware involved. I have solar on my roof and on a clear day in the winter I get about 40% of the power as a clear day in the summer. But that only needs one panel. Getting 20X the panels to get that extra 60% of the power doesn't make sense to me. Just put the suckers on the ground with a tilt-able stand.
I agree about shadow effects. More comes into play though since more angles will be approximately normal to the panels more angles of light will still be in an effective region of the panel for collecting. In winter in the non-tropical regions the sun's maximum height can be pretty low in the sky giving you a very oblique angle to fixed panels against a roof (assuming a shallow slope on the roof). Making these suckers stick up means that the crossection exposed to the sun is larger even if the sun is lower in the sky.
That said two problems I see:
1) Roof top intallation will be weight. I have panels on my roof and they are about 100lb per sq yard. Stack twenty together and you'd be looking at 2000lb per sq yard. Not a good thing for the roof.
2) Ground based panels: you can put the panels on stands that can be adjusted, heck they can be motorized so they can track the sun through the day AND through the seasons. So why exactly would you by ~20X more panels (at about 200 a pop) when a $50 motor per panel (guessing), or an adjustable stand that someone goes out and tilts every month or so can have the same affect?
Sold about 20M more units but from what I've read in Business Week I think it was a few months ago the problem is in game sales. Those casual gamers tend to by a few games and then stop. XBox and PS3 gamers tend to by a few games a quarter. Wii has a lot of add ons too but I suspect XBox with Kinect and its higher initial price probably makes the hardware sales a wash but they sell more games.
A bigger issue might be Kinect: maybe they don't have a new piece of hardware available yet and don't want to get caught being the company that releases the same accessory as the previous console confusing the argument for upgrading. They might end up coming out with it integrated in the console I suspect.
Exactly, we continue to expand the things that are fixable but there is always more. As people live longer they live long enough to have different problems. So today's #1 cancer gets cured only to have the population live another 5 years to die of some weird heart problem. We fix that and all of a sudden the #1 killer is skin cancer say, fix that then it becomes pneumonia. It is a game of wack a mole which by definition we'll never win since we all need to die.
As long as 7 of 9 is doing the assimilating count me in.
There is too many ways of getting disabled. Amputated limbs okay, but how much leg is left? If it is past the knee you might be okay but what if it is mid femur? What if it is neurological? Again how far up is the neurological problem? Are you a quadropeligic or is it just a local nerve in the leg? Do you have a degenerative neural disease so even your currently working nerves are weird? Too many variables I think an expanding portion of people will be candidates but I don't think we'll ever get everyone. I'm sorry sometimes the most reasonable thing to tell little Timmy is that he'll never walk again, and no really he'll never walk again. There isn't some miracle just around the corner etc. medicine tries too much to give hope to the hopeless it is becoming more of a religion every day. Same thing happens in cancer were I work.
Oh cancer will be cured in 20 years, yeah we've been hearing that since cancer was discovered. There is too many ways that your cells can go bad. Too many regions of the body, too many where cancers are really close to the normal tissues etc. We'll cure some, we'll prevent some, but there will always be cancer of one form or another and we need it: mutations are necessary for evolution.
Is your connection device to your pocket cloud a pocket rocket?
I guess one in the pro for the "if jihadis win" column.
Stephen says: "I caannt undurstannd yoou fukin patint trol".
I haven't used it on Win 7 just win XP at work. It works good enough I can live with it but I find it a little flaky. For example only the first (the one you start up with) seems to respond to the windows key. So Win-E opens win explorer but only on the first desktop. What that means in practice is I use two desktops, one gets my email, and work messaging stuff that is always open but I don't want distracting me. The other is my "working" desktop that all the shortcuts work on so that I can do things quickly.
Another "feature" whether good or bad: notifications only go to the desktop with the app on it. So for example Outlook notifications only get seen if you are on that desktop. I actually like that since that means I can decide when I want to see an email rather than get distracted every couple minutes by yet another all users email that has nothing to do with me.
Lastly, and this is painful, occasionally the mouse moves to the top right when you click (rare, but still happens every couple days). What this means is assuming you have a window maximized, occasionally you'll try to click on something and instead you'll end up closing whatever window was in that position in the screen. A bit of a piss off but infrequent enough I live with it.
Perhaps some of these things are not in win 7 land I'm not sure. At home I got a 27" screen so I'm not too concerned with screen real estate :-)
I have hardly any assets, it hurts when I sit.