Actually, I think it's you who have missed the point.
You've got (or had, rather) a niche product. You can't market a niche product to the mainstream and expect to get a lot of consumers. You've got to market it to your niche!! Frankly, Indie music is definitely a certain "class" of music, a very broad class with a good deal of variety, but indie music is not the same as mainstream music. Frankly, I don't like it much (except for a few exceptions), and most of it I wouldn't pay for. I'm not a fan of the most popular mainstream music either, I like what I like, and only some of it is covered by Indie artists.
It's like being upset that your favorite, high quality micro-brew isn't the most popular beer in the country. AHB never set out to make Bud Light everybody's favorite beer, what they did was attempt to be everybody's #2 choice, when they couldn't have their #1. And you know what? Bud Light is a very, very popular beer not because everybody loves it, but because most people are willing to drink it. It's a very different concept.
In fact, almost by definition high quality beer has distinctive charactaristics that will turn most people away from that beer. BUT! Microbrews market to people who like those kinds of beers, and make a lot of money doing it. Not as much as AHB or Miller, but they make good money. There are even restaurants that specialise in microbrews, and are extremely popular because of it. (A local restaurant made so much money off this concept, they opened a theater with the same idea - food and microbrews - and paid cash for it).
It's the same thing with music. Most mainstream music people listen to and go "hey, that's not bad, it's kinda catchy!" Mainstream music very very rarely blows someone's mind with it's awesomeness, because it is just plain bland for the most part. Market the hell out of bland music and you can make buckets of money. But, if you are smart about marketing niche music, you can still make piles of money, as long as your target is actually big enough. There may simply not be enough people who like the music you are selling.
To be honest, there are a lot of people making decent money off of internet distribution that had no chance of making that money without the internet. Not major label success, sure, but enough to feed their families and live the way they like. The fact that you failed is more a reflection of your ability to adapt to the market, and to excersize the power of the available tools, than anything groups like TPB have done.
Modern 3d doesn't use red/blue glasses. I've always stayed away from 3d because of how lame red/blue glasses are.
The latest 3d uses circular polarization, so no issues with color, like red/blue, and no issues with orientation (i.e. effect breaks if you're not sitting perfectly still and facing the screen "just so") like parallel/horizontal polarization. Honestly, it's really cool, I had no issues with convergence, and stuff really did look like it was 3D. The glasses were sturdy plastic, pretty high quality for theater 3d glasses. I didn't feel like a complete tard wearing them, hehe.
In Monsters vs Aliens the vast majority of the 3d effect was used to make it look like you were looking out into a rectangular hole in the wall onto the 3d scene, though they did have a couple "pop out" effects. One in particular was a paddle-ball toy, that was kinda funny, and unexpected.
I popped my glasses on and off a few times, and the difference was incredible. Obviously with the glasses off things were a little blurred and odd, but they were just so incredibly flat, it was stunning. It was easilly the best 3d I've ever seen, and I can't wait for more.
For sure I'm worried about how good live-action will be, but the animation was just stunning, so I'm sure live will be decent at least.
Er, that's not something movie makers are going to be able to help, at least not for a long, long time.
You're an exception man, your objection doesn't apply to most people. Sorry.
And, to me, 3d made Monsters vs. Aliens. I thought it was great, but I know wouldn't have liked it as much without the 3d. It made the whole thing much more immersive and fascinating at the same time. I'm surprised how far the tech has come.
Maybe they'll come up with a fix for amblyopia? Special polarized lenses that are tweaked maybe?
There are a number of pretty good research websites on-line that would be made available via a "poke holes" system instead of a "block bad stuff" system. In these research sites there are quite a few studies on child developement in gay households (relative to how many studies there actually are).
That's because these are *gasp!* academic websites! I'm not even talking Wikipedia here, though that would almost certainly be allowed as well.
Your fairy tale assumes that LGBT sites would still be blocked, and technically they would, but since ALL research is channeled through avenues that would have the information on the topic, and since nobody else gets to browse whatever the heck they want, it's fair. It also focuses the child on the task at hand, which is research, or whatever other web tool the school may be using, instead of looking up sports scores or googling their friends of facebooking or whatever other new nonsense comes out.
If a school impliments this poorly, it's something that should be taken up with the school board and should be fairly easilly redressed, as opposed to blocking software which is fairly arbitrary and inaccurate, as the OP points out.
BTW, the flip side of your fairy tale would be those anti-LGBT websites that are allowed through the blocking software, those websites, and the child who wants to do research on the subject, would be blocked with a "poke holes" system as well. However, information ABOUT the position and those groups would not be blocked, and chances are it would be more objective and removed from the fanatical (and sometimes completely irrational) positions and arguments those websites tend to preach. That's on both sides, btw. The only groups I can think of that would be worse than the pro/anti LGBT groups are the pro/anti abortion groups.
The lot of them should be blocked, but information ABOUT them should not. Especially not good, objective information, which you are more apt to find on a research website than a foaming-at-the-mouth support website.
Check that again, the Skystream produced roughly 1/10 of the energy an average house needs. The Montana, which did the best, still only produced 1/6 the energy needed.
The average home (in the US at least) uses about 18,000kwh of energy per year total. A lot of that is supplimented with natural gas to bring it down to around 6,000kwh on average. With careful energy use you could cut that already lower than average use rating down to about 4000kwh.
Now, this is best case scenario pretty much, and you still need a bare minimum of two Skystreams or Montanas. The Skystream gives little wiggle room if you happen to use more than 4000kwh, as it produces just barely over 2100kwh per year. The Montana fares better, at 2600kwh, giving you up to 5200kwh of energy, but it costs almost double. If you're frugal with your energy you could sell it back to the grid, but you'd be losing money on each kwh until you approach the break even point.
The Skystream, at roughly 11k Euros (14k US) each, would cost 22k Euros for the bare minimum that a very small number of people are going to find sufficient. Bump up to the Montana and you're looking at a 36k Euro (47k USD) investment to power a small, energy efficient house. That's a lot. Do you realise how long it will take to recoup that investment? The windmills will break down eventually, and then what? It's almost certainly going to cost a couple thousand dollars to have a repair man come fix it, after all it's not a common household appliance.
However, if you can swing it, props to you. And there's nothing wrong with supplimenting your electricity with one of these. Though, I hope you're a good electrician/mechanic in case it breaks down.
The "Why don't you have some bread with that?" line sounds similar to "Would you like some cheese with your whine?" but without the pun. Probably a good but not so common US version would be to sarcastically use the line: "Would you like fries with that?" from McDonalds and such.
Get server hardware. It's the only stuff built these days with reliability as the #1 concern. And get GOOD server hardware. That doesn't mean dual quads with 64gb ram, that means a well known line in a company known for servers. I'd probably go HP or IBM, and for what your father needs you can pick the bare minimum and it will be fine for years.
Remember when you spec this out, that #1 failures are those with moving parts, as others have said already. This means, when you build your server, you want the LOWEST capacity and LOWEST speed you can get, for reliability. The high capacity, high speed drives fail the quickest because they push the hardest. SSD might be a good alternative, but as yet the long-term reliability is unproven and they have a definite limited life-span (i.e. # of writes, how quickly that is used depends on the application), instead of a constant potential failure rate. The plus on that is there should be very little chance of a SSD failing until it actually reaches its end of life.
So, slowest fans you can get, or no fans if possible, and slowest HDD. You should probably go with as low a power CPU as possible also, to keep from taxing the PSU.
Also note, VM would be a heck of a lot of work to get going, but new migrations and failure recovery should be simpler. Gotta pick what works for you.
And how many gun crimes are commited with legally owned guns? Nobody can say for sure, but what they can say is it's not much.
When the Brady Bill was introduced, the FBI stated that 11 out of 13 guns used in crime were illegally owned.
The NRA, of course, puts that number much lower - 0.5%, but they've got statistics to back it up.
Another fun fact: there have only been TWO cases where an illegally owned machine gun was used in a murder. That's out of 240,000 legally owned machine guns.
The fact is, the cities with the strictest gun control have the highest rates of gun-related crime. Washington DC is a prime example, it is illegal to own a gun or carry it accross state lines (or was, I don't remember how that mess all turned out recently), yet it has one of the highest gun-crime rates in the country. Part of the problem is crowded cities and the existance of gangs, but cities of similar size but looser firearms laws have lower gun-related crime.
Also, the majority of crimes with guns are commited by hand guns, not assault rifles. It's a big majority too. So, by the reasoning most often used to support an assault rifle ban, we REALLY aught to be banning handguns, right? Except that ban is the least constitutional one, almost ANY reading of the constitution and the right to bear arms makes handguns legal.
Do you know what the difference between a semi-automatic pistol and a semi-automatic assault rifle is? It's an extended barrel and a butstock. In fact, the part that is considered a firearm is almost identical.
It should be all or nothing, and nothing is unconstitutional.
This guy didn't sell his art to the stock company, somebody ELSE stripped his mark from the pieces and sold them to the stock company. The stock company was scammed by a 3rd party and has been collecting money for them (note that does NOT absolve them from doing thorough enough verification, at least as I understand things).
Not only is this guy entitled to all of the income for these photos, he's entitled to any punative copywrite damages on top of that. Assuming he wins, of course. If he has the proof he says he does it's a no-brainer though, so it's a safe bet. Since the stock photo company probably didn't actually know the photos were stolen, they'd get lesser punative damages levied against them, but it's still on top of any money they've already received.
Re:So, the computer notices things are wrong ...
on
Three Mile Island Memories
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· Score: 2, Informative
If you think you can just "turn off the tap" at a gas plant, you are sorely mistaken. Pressures start to build when you do that, so if you block the gas off in one section, it will build in another. You've got a lot of systems to kill before you can turn off the gas - the source must go first, then at about the same time pumps pushing the gas along (these may be in the same spot, which makes that easier), then you can kill any processing systems along the way, and then you can close the tap.
If you DO have to close the tap first (a pipe failure that is leaking gas, for example) you've got to get a relief valve open and start burning your excess until you can get the gas re-routed or the rest of the plant shut down. If you don't, the plant goes bye-bye big-boom style. Where I work I'm about 1/4-1/2 mile from a flow station, and we're still in the blast radius of a catastrophic failure.
Whereas, as others have pointed out, nuclear power plants do in fact have a 1-button shutoff mechanism that kills the reaction immediately. Then containment is a cinch, if costly.
The problem was the alarm system + the reporting system was poorly designed, and the errors were of such magnituted that it actually looked like less of a problem than it was, and the operators had no way to confirm what the problem was. In a nutshell.
Add to that the fact that, since re-starting one of these systems from a cold start (which is what pushing the little red button to cease the reaction would mean) costs millions of dollars, SOP is to try everything you can to fix the problem FIRST, and then, as an absolute last resort, you kill the reaction (or shut down the gas plant, it's the same reasoning). So if the alarm looks like a malfunction in the alarm system, and not in the process, they are certainly not going to shut down the system until the alarm is fixed or they verify the malfunction in the process.
My question is, where was the redundant alarm system? Shouldn't that be a no-brainer for something with the damage potential of a nuclear plant? I mean, it might not have helped finding the problem, but it might have prompted the decision to shut down much sooner if BOTH alarm systems go out at exactly the same time.
Mind you, this is based entirely on the comments in this thread and the article summary so some of this may have been covered already. Naturally I would never RTFA.
That control room is very similar (if a bit larger and whiter) to the control rooms in gas plants, oil rigs, and pump/flow stations in oil fields today. The stuff may seem old as heck, but really a lot of that stuff you can't just replace with a fancy new computer. The best you can do in the control room is upgrade to digital displays and consolodate sections a little bit. But that may not even be ideal, because the analog systems will be able to run for a lot longer during a power failure than a digital will, and that's a BIG deal.
One thing you CAN do is send all the information in that control room to a fancy new computer, and then you only need a couple hands-on operators at the plant in case things go very wrong. The rest can be handled by operators sitting in front of a few monitors back at home-base.
I know you didn't really say it, but I'd wager you were thinking it, and you've got to realize that is not a giant computer. It is a giant control room. It's not like you can replace the steering wheel of your car because you've got a new engine.
I said on a per-core basis! The Xeon X5570 is a quad core machine!
That's like running a race between a unicycle and a quadcycle, and claiming the unicycle is obviously the superior transportation because it has more hp per-wheel.
Your caveat is idiotic. If the Power6 can only have 1 core in a chip, it should be judged on a per-chip basis, not a per-core basis as the chip is the lowest level it can be sub-divided into.
Now, if you've got a dual or quad core Power6 (quad would be apples to apples) then a per-core comparison is reasonable.
Quit using caveats to show the lesser competitor is superior. It's dumb and dishonest.
Er, I dunno if you know this, but journalists don't get special protections under the constitution. What they do is use, on a daily basis, constitutional rights we all have. They also tend to have large organizations helping them defend those rights (usually).
There is no legal ethics requirement for journalists beyond things like libel and slander that I know of, at least on a national level, and any contractual obligations they may have signed. The ethics requirements they have are self-imposed by the industry, and they do this because without them journalists would run rampant with sensationalism and half-truths, as they did in the days of Yellow Journalism. Back then, a lot of journalists did go to jail for slander and libel, and on the whole it was hard to trust that the news you heard was true. With public outcry came self-imposed ethics, and today the worst you get is a story that is true but told from a certain perspective with a heavy bias toward one particular issue, ideal, or party. That's a far cry from the yellow journalism of the old days. Dan Rather came close though, and what happened to him? Outed by a blogger and lost his job, that's what. Even then, he didn't make it up, he just didn't check his sources. And he didn't go to jail, he lost his job.
What the bruhahas (there have been several) about protecting sources was about, was the fact that the Government cannot -force- you to reveal a source. That's for anybody, not just journalists. It is a right the government does not have, because WE have the right to remain silent. That has been proven time and time again, to the point that the police are required to remind of that fact before they arrest you.
None of that means the Government can't find out about your source by some other means, which is what we have here.
If the Police have legal justification for siezing his equipment - and they may, though siezing the modem and router was obviously done to spite him - then this is a very good way of getting at information that may reveal who the informants are.
It's totally slimey, but it could still be technically legit.
And for those slamming people for assuming the guy is innocent, well that is how the system was designed!! We SHOULD assume he is innocent UNLESS evidence comes out to show he is otherwise. It is an assumption of innocence until he is proven beyond a reasonable doubt that he is guilty, and it is the fairest way of looking at any similar situations. You can have suspicions, those are caused by *gasp!* evidence which suggests things may not be right, but don't assume guilt unless it has been proven, especially when it relates to the Phoenix PD from what other commenters are saying.
It is attitudes like that which ruin a person's life long after they have been exhonerated, and it disgusts me that it happens.
Case in point: Senator Ted Stevens, who was railroaded during the elections, has been completely exhonorated. Even people on slashdot, who didn't know him other than his famous "the internet is a series of tubes" comment. You can read the story here: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090401/ap_on_go_ot/stevens_justice
Does the slimeball who beat him, because of the corrupt (and highly politically motivated) prosecution against him, have to give up the senate seat since he won because of a complete fabrication? Not likely, and since he wasn't directly involved (no more than a "wink, wink" here and there) he'll never be impeached. We got screwed out of one of the few honest politicians in the Senate because of this "He's got to be guilty of SOMETHING" attitude. Hell the whole thing even cost ANOTHER senator his seat, because he took money from a "corrupt" Senator Stevens. What about him?
I've heard of him before, apparently he's legendary at Harvard Law as being brilliant in regards to the theory of law.
Whether he's any good at practicing it, I dunno. Best of luck to him, I hope he succeeds.
As for me, I'm willing to pay as long as it is at a price I feel is reasonable. Unfortunately for me that price tops out at about 20 cents per song, so I haven't been buying much music since AllOfMP3.com got shut down.
Maybe they'll be back after this, I can only hope.:)
If giving a copy of a CD to just one of your friends is fair use, then so is giving it to 100,000 of your closest friends. There is no maximum amount of friends you are legally allowed to have, there for if one is fair, so is the other.
If you want to argue that giving a copy of a CD to 100,000 of your closest friends is not fair use, you must also argue that giving it to just one of your closest friends is not fair use either, because there is no set definition for what constitutes a "close friend", outside of whatever criteria an individual chooses to use.:)
Baen Books does this very thing, they offer 100% free, complete versions of the ebooks (high quality, in multiple formats, not shit) by any of their authors willing to participate. 43 authors choose to do so, and the vast majority of them saw a major boost in sales of their entire catalog when they did.
Eric Flint, one of the co-founders of the free program, spells it out with his own book sales. Basically, he made 85% of his money on a book of his in the first six months, another 8% or so the following six months, about 1.5% for the next year. That's when he put it online for free, and a funny thing happened. His sales doubled from the previous 6 month period, and had grown another 50% for the following period.
My money is on "pirated" music being the only thing propping the industry up right now. If they actually find a way to snuff out internet music sharing, it very well could be their downfall.
I'm not the one to define where the line is drawn.
Why not? What makes anybody else in the world more qualified to make such a judgement call than you?
The truth is, if it crosses your line and you care about it enough, you should fight for or against it (whichever is appropriate). You should have all sorts of "lines" like these that you fight when they are crossed. You aught to make up your mind on what is not enough, and what goes too far. You have every right to say "Hey, that's not right!" and do something about it, and I would argue that if you DON'T, regardless of your position, you are neglecting your responsibility to your social community - be it your neighborhood, city, state, country, or anything in the middle.
When a lot of people make these kinds of judgement calls on their own, and fight for/defend them individually and with like minded individuals, the end result in a democracy or a republic is usually the closest thing a society can come to a balanced resolution. (In a tyranny, it often ends in executions until enough people are like-minded, then an uprising and civil war happens. Not pretty, but probably worth it if it makes it that far.)
It doesn't always work out to be the most fair, but usually it does. Passing up your right to think for yourself and make your views known only makes it more certain that your own views will not be considered in the grand scheme of things.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the CO2 in beer came from the air, via plants that were grown recently (within a few months). The CO2 released due to beer production (or even any kind of plant destruction - wood burning stoves, etc.) is a wash. The only claim you can make against it are for any inefficiences and related costs in the production - like heating the pots, and the infrastructure around producing the beer on a mass scale.
In the long view, the same is true for coal and oil. The leading theories that I know of for oil-well formation involve plants and animals that died, were trapped, and eventually turned to oil. Same for coal. We have actually produced an immitation coal for thousands of years just by charring wood. Now, since this process takes millenia (coal and oil, not charcoal) and not a few months, it has a significant (to us) potential impact. However, in the grand scheme of things, thousands of years down the road, it is a net wash as well.
What we really need to be working on is an effecient way to re-sequester all that carbon we've been releasing and put it to good use again - give ourselves a net wash for global energy production while maintaining the current climate status, because we like the current climate. It suits us.
Re:Can't pay for your car? Ride a bicycle!
on
Cellular Repo Man
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· Score: 1
A lot of people up here, in Alaska, do it every winter. They get these huge, fat tires with studs all over them for their bikes and cruise on in to work every day.
Not kidding.
I think they are nuts, but if you layer up properly even -20 isn't so bad...
I recently installed some industrial software who's installation/licensing scheme struck me as incredibly brilliant.
They don't care how many machines you have, or even how many machines you install the software on. What they care about is that you are only ever using one instance of the software at a time, because that is the license you payed for.
To accomplish this, they use a 2-part licensing scheme that is based on an original license authorization, and a randomly generated key created upon installation. To transfer the authorization, you have to have the key generated by the software on the computer you want to transfer to first, then you can use it to generate a NEW authorization on the old machine. Generating a new authorization re-creates the original machine's key, breaking the authorization there, so a new transfer is required in order to use it again.
You can move it around all you want, you can even operate off of two machines if you want, you just have to re-authorize it each time. Also, because it's just a standard licensing scheme and not some crazy copy protection, it doesn't break any functionality.
Most people would find this reasonable, I think, and sure it's breakable, but the market for such a crack should be reduced, and if done well that's a hard system to circumvent. I think so anyway, I could be wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
He said piracy first, the Linux was just wishful thinking.
People will just pirate the hell out of the full version of W7.
Actually, I think it's you who have missed the point.
You've got (or had, rather) a niche product. You can't market a niche product to the mainstream and expect to get a lot of consumers. You've got to market it to your niche!! Frankly, Indie music is definitely a certain "class" of music, a very broad class with a good deal of variety, but indie music is not the same as mainstream music. Frankly, I don't like it much (except for a few exceptions), and most of it I wouldn't pay for. I'm not a fan of the most popular mainstream music either, I like what I like, and only some of it is covered by Indie artists.
It's like being upset that your favorite, high quality micro-brew isn't the most popular beer in the country. AHB never set out to make Bud Light everybody's favorite beer, what they did was attempt to be everybody's #2 choice, when they couldn't have their #1. And you know what? Bud Light is a very, very popular beer not because everybody loves it, but because most people are willing to drink it. It's a very different concept.
In fact, almost by definition high quality beer has distinctive charactaristics that will turn most people away from that beer. BUT! Microbrews market to people who like those kinds of beers, and make a lot of money doing it. Not as much as AHB or Miller, but they make good money. There are even restaurants that specialise in microbrews, and are extremely popular because of it. (A local restaurant made so much money off this concept, they opened a theater with the same idea - food and microbrews - and paid cash for it).
It's the same thing with music. Most mainstream music people listen to and go "hey, that's not bad, it's kinda catchy!" Mainstream music very very rarely blows someone's mind with it's awesomeness, because it is just plain bland for the most part. Market the hell out of bland music and you can make buckets of money. But, if you are smart about marketing niche music, you can still make piles of money, as long as your target is actually big enough. There may simply not be enough people who like the music you are selling.
To be honest, there are a lot of people making decent money off of internet distribution that had no chance of making that money without the internet. Not major label success, sure, but enough to feed their families and live the way they like. The fact that you failed is more a reflection of your ability to adapt to the market, and to excersize the power of the available tools, than anything groups like TPB have done.
Modern 3d doesn't use red/blue glasses. I've always stayed away from 3d because of how lame red/blue glasses are.
The latest 3d uses circular polarization, so no issues with color, like red/blue, and no issues with orientation (i.e. effect breaks if you're not sitting perfectly still and facing the screen "just so") like parallel/horizontal polarization. Honestly, it's really cool, I had no issues with convergence, and stuff really did look like it was 3D. The glasses were sturdy plastic, pretty high quality for theater 3d glasses. I didn't feel like a complete tard wearing them, hehe.
In Monsters vs Aliens the vast majority of the 3d effect was used to make it look like you were looking out into a rectangular hole in the wall onto the 3d scene, though they did have a couple "pop out" effects. One in particular was a paddle-ball toy, that was kinda funny, and unexpected.
I popped my glasses on and off a few times, and the difference was incredible. Obviously with the glasses off things were a little blurred and odd, but they were just so incredibly flat, it was stunning. It was easilly the best 3d I've ever seen, and I can't wait for more.
For sure I'm worried about how good live-action will be, but the animation was just stunning, so I'm sure live will be decent at least.
Er, that's not something movie makers are going to be able to help, at least not for a long, long time.
You're an exception man, your objection doesn't apply to most people. Sorry.
And, to me, 3d made Monsters vs. Aliens. I thought it was great, but I know wouldn't have liked it as much without the 3d. It made the whole thing much more immersive and fascinating at the same time. I'm surprised how far the tech has come.
Maybe they'll come up with a fix for amblyopia? Special polarized lenses that are tweaked maybe?
Your fairy tale missed his point entirely.
There are a number of pretty good research websites on-line that would be made available via a "poke holes" system instead of a "block bad stuff" system. In these research sites there are quite a few studies on child developement in gay households (relative to how many studies there actually are).
That's because these are *gasp!* academic websites! I'm not even talking Wikipedia here, though that would almost certainly be allowed as well.
Your fairy tale assumes that LGBT sites would still be blocked, and technically they would, but since ALL research is channeled through avenues that would have the information on the topic, and since nobody else gets to browse whatever the heck they want, it's fair. It also focuses the child on the task at hand, which is research, or whatever other web tool the school may be using, instead of looking up sports scores or googling their friends of facebooking or whatever other new nonsense comes out.
If a school impliments this poorly, it's something that should be taken up with the school board and should be fairly easilly redressed, as opposed to blocking software which is fairly arbitrary and inaccurate, as the OP points out.
BTW, the flip side of your fairy tale would be those anti-LGBT websites that are allowed through the blocking software, those websites, and the child who wants to do research on the subject, would be blocked with a "poke holes" system as well. However, information ABOUT the position and those groups would not be blocked, and chances are it would be more objective and removed from the fanatical (and sometimes completely irrational) positions and arguments those websites tend to preach. That's on both sides, btw. The only groups I can think of that would be worse than the pro/anti LGBT groups are the pro/anti abortion groups.
The lot of them should be blocked, but information ABOUT them should not. Especially not good, objective information, which you are more apt to find on a research website than a foaming-at-the-mouth support website.
Check that again, the Skystream produced roughly 1/10 of the energy an average house needs. The Montana, which did the best, still only produced 1/6 the energy needed.
The average home (in the US at least) uses about 18,000kwh of energy per year total. A lot of that is supplimented with natural gas to bring it down to around 6,000kwh on average. With careful energy use you could cut that already lower than average use rating down to about 4000kwh.
Now, this is best case scenario pretty much, and you still need a bare minimum of two Skystreams or Montanas. The Skystream gives little wiggle room if you happen to use more than 4000kwh, as it produces just barely over 2100kwh per year. The Montana fares better, at 2600kwh, giving you up to 5200kwh of energy, but it costs almost double. If you're frugal with your energy you could sell it back to the grid, but you'd be losing money on each kwh until you approach the break even point.
The Skystream, at roughly 11k Euros (14k US) each, would cost 22k Euros for the bare minimum that a very small number of people are going to find sufficient. Bump up to the Montana and you're looking at a 36k Euro (47k USD) investment to power a small, energy efficient house. That's a lot. Do you realise how long it will take to recoup that investment? The windmills will break down eventually, and then what? It's almost certainly going to cost a couple thousand dollars to have a repair man come fix it, after all it's not a common household appliance.
However, if you can swing it, props to you. And there's nothing wrong with supplimenting your electricity with one of these. Though, I hope you're a good electrician/mechanic in case it breaks down.
Cheers :)
The "Why don't you have some bread with that?" line sounds similar to "Would you like some cheese with your whine?" but without the pun. Probably a good but not so common US version would be to sarcastically use the line: "Would you like fries with that?" from McDonalds and such.
Get server hardware. It's the only stuff built these days with reliability as the #1 concern. And get GOOD server hardware. That doesn't mean dual quads with 64gb ram, that means a well known line in a company known for servers. I'd probably go HP or IBM, and for what your father needs you can pick the bare minimum and it will be fine for years.
Remember when you spec this out, that #1 failures are those with moving parts, as others have said already. This means, when you build your server, you want the LOWEST capacity and LOWEST speed you can get, for reliability. The high capacity, high speed drives fail the quickest because they push the hardest. SSD might be a good alternative, but as yet the long-term reliability is unproven and they have a definite limited life-span (i.e. # of writes, how quickly that is used depends on the application), instead of a constant potential failure rate. The plus on that is there should be very little chance of a SSD failing until it actually reaches its end of life.
So, slowest fans you can get, or no fans if possible, and slowest HDD. You should probably go with as low a power CPU as possible also, to keep from taxing the PSU.
Also note, VM would be a heck of a lot of work to get going, but new migrations and failure recovery should be simpler. Gotta pick what works for you.
Daggummit, gotta proofread better.
Only two LEGALLY owned machine guns have ever been used for murder, all others were obtained illegally.
And how many gun crimes are commited with legally owned guns? Nobody can say for sure, but what they can say is it's not much.
When the Brady Bill was introduced, the FBI stated that 11 out of 13 guns used in crime were illegally owned.
The NRA, of course, puts that number much lower - 0.5%, but they've got statistics to back it up.
Another fun fact: there have only been TWO cases where an illegally owned machine gun was used in a murder. That's out of 240,000 legally owned machine guns.
The fact is, the cities with the strictest gun control have the highest rates of gun-related crime. Washington DC is a prime example, it is illegal to own a gun or carry it accross state lines (or was, I don't remember how that mess all turned out recently), yet it has one of the highest gun-crime rates in the country. Part of the problem is crowded cities and the existance of gangs, but cities of similar size but looser firearms laws have lower gun-related crime.
Also, the majority of crimes with guns are commited by hand guns, not assault rifles. It's a big majority too. So, by the reasoning most often used to support an assault rifle ban, we REALLY aught to be banning handguns, right? Except that ban is the least constitutional one, almost ANY reading of the constitution and the right to bear arms makes handguns legal.
Do you know what the difference between a semi-automatic pistol and a semi-automatic assault rifle is? It's an extended barrel and a butstock. In fact, the part that is considered a firearm is almost identical.
It should be all or nothing, and nothing is unconstitutional.
Cheers!
Huh?
This guy didn't sell his art to the stock company, somebody ELSE stripped his mark from the pieces and sold them to the stock company. The stock company was scammed by a 3rd party and has been collecting money for them (note that does NOT absolve them from doing thorough enough verification, at least as I understand things).
Not only is this guy entitled to all of the income for these photos, he's entitled to any punative copywrite damages on top of that. Assuming he wins, of course. If he has the proof he says he does it's a no-brainer though, so it's a safe bet. Since the stock photo company probably didn't actually know the photos were stolen, they'd get lesser punative damages levied against them, but it's still on top of any money they've already received.
If you think you can just "turn off the tap" at a gas plant, you are sorely mistaken. Pressures start to build when you do that, so if you block the gas off in one section, it will build in another. You've got a lot of systems to kill before you can turn off the gas - the source must go first, then at about the same time pumps pushing the gas along (these may be in the same spot, which makes that easier), then you can kill any processing systems along the way, and then you can close the tap.
If you DO have to close the tap first (a pipe failure that is leaking gas, for example) you've got to get a relief valve open and start burning your excess until you can get the gas re-routed or the rest of the plant shut down. If you don't, the plant goes bye-bye big-boom style. Where I work I'm about 1/4-1/2 mile from a flow station, and we're still in the blast radius of a catastrophic failure.
Whereas, as others have pointed out, nuclear power plants do in fact have a 1-button shutoff mechanism that kills the reaction immediately. Then containment is a cinch, if costly.
The problem was the alarm system + the reporting system was poorly designed, and the errors were of such magnituted that it actually looked like less of a problem than it was, and the operators had no way to confirm what the problem was. In a nutshell.
Add to that the fact that, since re-starting one of these systems from a cold start (which is what pushing the little red button to cease the reaction would mean) costs millions of dollars, SOP is to try everything you can to fix the problem FIRST, and then, as an absolute last resort, you kill the reaction (or shut down the gas plant, it's the same reasoning). So if the alarm looks like a malfunction in the alarm system, and not in the process, they are certainly not going to shut down the system until the alarm is fixed or they verify the malfunction in the process.
My question is, where was the redundant alarm system? Shouldn't that be a no-brainer for something with the damage potential of a nuclear plant? I mean, it might not have helped finding the problem, but it might have prompted the decision to shut down much sooner if BOTH alarm systems go out at exactly the same time.
Mind you, this is based entirely on the comments in this thread and the article summary so some of this may have been covered already. Naturally I would never RTFA.
That control room is very similar (if a bit larger and whiter) to the control rooms in gas plants, oil rigs, and pump/flow stations in oil fields today. The stuff may seem old as heck, but really a lot of that stuff you can't just replace with a fancy new computer. The best you can do in the control room is upgrade to digital displays and consolodate sections a little bit. But that may not even be ideal, because the analog systems will be able to run for a lot longer during a power failure than a digital will, and that's a BIG deal.
One thing you CAN do is send all the information in that control room to a fancy new computer, and then you only need a couple hands-on operators at the plant in case things go very wrong. The rest can be handled by operators sitting in front of a few monitors back at home-base.
I know you didn't really say it, but I'd wager you were thinking it, and you've got to realize that is not a giant computer. It is a giant control room. It's not like you can replace the steering wheel of your car because you've got a new engine.
I said on a per-core basis!
The Xeon X5570 is a quad core machine!
That's like running a race between a unicycle and a quadcycle, and claiming the unicycle is obviously the superior transportation because it has more hp per-wheel.
Your caveat is idiotic. If the Power6 can only have 1 core in a chip, it should be judged on a per-chip basis, not a per-core basis as the chip is the lowest level it can be sub-divided into.
Now, if you've got a dual or quad core Power6 (quad would be apples to apples) then a per-core comparison is reasonable.
Quit using caveats to show the lesser competitor is superior. It's dumb and dishonest.
Er, I dunno if you know this, but journalists don't get special protections under the constitution. What they do is use, on a daily basis, constitutional rights we all have. They also tend to have large organizations helping them defend those rights (usually).
There is no legal ethics requirement for journalists beyond things like libel and slander that I know of, at least on a national level, and any contractual obligations they may have signed. The ethics requirements they have are self-imposed by the industry, and they do this because without them journalists would run rampant with sensationalism and half-truths, as they did in the days of Yellow Journalism. Back then, a lot of journalists did go to jail for slander and libel, and on the whole it was hard to trust that the news you heard was true. With public outcry came self-imposed ethics, and today the worst you get is a story that is true but told from a certain perspective with a heavy bias toward one particular issue, ideal, or party. That's a far cry from the yellow journalism of the old days. Dan Rather came close though, and what happened to him? Outed by a blogger and lost his job, that's what. Even then, he didn't make it up, he just didn't check his sources. And he didn't go to jail, he lost his job.
What the bruhahas (there have been several) about protecting sources was about, was the fact that the Government cannot -force- you to reveal a source. That's for anybody, not just journalists. It is a right the government does not have, because WE have the right to remain silent. That has been proven time and time again, to the point that the police are required to remind of that fact before they arrest you.
None of that means the Government can't find out about your source by some other means, which is what we have here.
If the Police have legal justification for siezing his equipment - and they may, though siezing the modem and router was obviously done to spite him - then this is a very good way of getting at information that may reveal who the informants are.
It's totally slimey, but it could still be technically legit.
And for those slamming people for assuming the guy is innocent, well that is how the system was designed!! We SHOULD assume he is innocent UNLESS evidence comes out to show he is otherwise. It is an assumption of innocence until he is proven beyond a reasonable doubt that he is guilty, and it is the fairest way of looking at any similar situations. You can have suspicions, those are caused by *gasp!* evidence which suggests things may not be right, but don't assume guilt unless it has been proven, especially when it relates to the Phoenix PD from what other commenters are saying.
It is attitudes like that which ruin a person's life long after they have been exhonerated, and it disgusts me that it happens.
Case in point: Senator Ted Stevens, who was railroaded during the elections, has been completely exhonorated. Even people on slashdot, who didn't know him other than his famous "the internet is a series of tubes" comment. You can read the story here: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090401/ap_on_go_ot/stevens_justice
Does the slimeball who beat him, because of the corrupt (and highly politically motivated) prosecution against him, have to give up the senate seat since he won because of a complete fabrication? Not likely, and since he wasn't directly involved (no more than a "wink, wink" here and there) he'll never be impeached. We got screwed out of one of the few honest politicians in the Senate because of this "He's got to be guilty of SOMETHING" attitude. Hell the whole thing even cost ANOTHER senator his seat, because he took money from a "corrupt" Senator Stevens. What about him?
I've heard of him before, apparently he's legendary at Harvard Law as being brilliant in regards to the theory of law.
Whether he's any good at practicing it, I dunno. Best of luck to him, I hope he succeeds.
As for me, I'm willing to pay as long as it is at a price I feel is reasonable. Unfortunately for me that price tops out at about 20 cents per song, so I haven't been buying much music since AllOfMP3.com got shut down.
Maybe they'll be back after this, I can only hope. :)
If giving a copy of a CD to just one of your friends is fair use, then so is giving it to 100,000 of your closest friends. There is no maximum amount of friends you are legally allowed to have, there for if one is fair, so is the other.
If you want to argue that giving a copy of a CD to 100,000 of your closest friends is not fair use, you must also argue that giving it to just one of your closest friends is not fair use either, because there is no set definition for what constitutes a "close friend", outside of whatever criteria an individual chooses to use. :)
Baen Books does this very thing, they offer 100% free, complete versions of the ebooks (high quality, in multiple formats, not shit) by any of their authors willing to participate. 43 authors choose to do so, and the vast majority of them saw a major boost in sales of their entire catalog when they did.
http://www.baen.com/library/
Eric Flint, one of the co-founders of the free program, spells it out with his own book sales. Basically, he made 85% of his money on a book of his in the first six months, another 8% or so the following six months, about 1.5% for the next year. That's when he put it online for free, and a funny thing happened. His sales doubled from the previous 6 month period, and had grown another 50% for the following period.
My money is on "pirated" music being the only thing propping the industry up right now. If they actually find a way to snuff out internet music sharing, it very well could be their downfall.
I'm not the one to define where the line is drawn.
Why not? What makes anybody else in the world more qualified to make such a judgement call than you?
The truth is, if it crosses your line and you care about it enough, you should fight for or against it (whichever is appropriate). You should have all sorts of "lines" like these that you fight when they are crossed. You aught to make up your mind on what is not enough, and what goes too far. You have every right to say "Hey, that's not right!" and do something about it, and I would argue that if you DON'T, regardless of your position, you are neglecting your responsibility to your social community - be it your neighborhood, city, state, country, or anything in the middle.
When a lot of people make these kinds of judgement calls on their own, and fight for/defend them individually and with like minded individuals, the end result in a democracy or a republic is usually the closest thing a society can come to a balanced resolution. (In a tyranny, it often ends in executions until enough people are like-minded, then an uprising and civil war happens. Not pretty, but probably worth it if it makes it that far.)
It doesn't always work out to be the most fair, but usually it does. Passing up your right to think for yourself and make your views known only makes it more certain that your own views will not be considered in the grand scheme of things.
A month, a friggin month to unplug from a 100mb switch port and plug into a 1gb switch port.
5 minute change if you include the exhaustive checks, and double checks, and tripple checks to make sure there is not a problem.
Change Management at its finest!
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the CO2 in beer came from the air, via plants that were grown recently (within a few months). The CO2 released due to beer production (or even any kind of plant destruction - wood burning stoves, etc.) is a wash. The only claim you can make against it are for any inefficiences and related costs in the production - like heating the pots, and the infrastructure around producing the beer on a mass scale.
In the long view, the same is true for coal and oil. The leading theories that I know of for oil-well formation involve plants and animals that died, were trapped, and eventually turned to oil. Same for coal. We have actually produced an immitation coal for thousands of years just by charring wood. Now, since this process takes millenia (coal and oil, not charcoal) and not a few months, it has a significant (to us) potential impact. However, in the grand scheme of things, thousands of years down the road, it is a net wash as well.
What we really need to be working on is an effecient way to re-sequester all that carbon we've been releasing and put it to good use again - give ourselves a net wash for global energy production while maintaining the current climate status, because we like the current climate. It suits us.
A lot of people up here, in Alaska, do it every winter. They get these huge, fat tires with studs all over them for their bikes and cruise on in to work every day.
Not kidding.
I think they are nuts, but if you layer up properly even -20 isn't so bad...
Indeed so!
Ouch, you can go to 4g for $50 straight from Dell (not even newegg! just Dell!).
You got robbed dude.
I recently installed some industrial software who's installation/licensing scheme struck me as incredibly brilliant.
They don't care how many machines you have, or even how many machines you install the software on. What they care about is that you are only ever using one instance of the software at a time, because that is the license you payed for.
To accomplish this, they use a 2-part licensing scheme that is based on an original license authorization, and a randomly generated key created upon installation. To transfer the authorization, you have to have the key generated by the software on the computer you want to transfer to first, then you can use it to generate a NEW authorization on the old machine. Generating a new authorization re-creates the original machine's key, breaking the authorization there, so a new transfer is required in order to use it again.
You can move it around all you want, you can even operate off of two machines if you want, you just have to re-authorize it each time. Also, because it's just a standard licensing scheme and not some crazy copy protection, it doesn't break any functionality.
Most people would find this reasonable, I think, and sure it's breakable, but the market for such a crack should be reduced, and if done well that's a hard system to circumvent. I think so anyway, I could be wrong.