For the super-pedantic among us, he obviously meant "buy and install a functional flush toilet alone." Yes you can go to Home Depot and buy the porcelain (if you live in the US or another developed country that actually has such products on the shelf). No, you're not going to be able to connect it to either a water supply or a sewer line where there aren't either of those things. And there are plenty of places in the world where there are neither.
Pixar is Disney. Rest assured, Pixar releases will never again compete against Disney Animation Studios releases. Release dates will be exquisitely chosen to maximize revenue for each.
yes, long line of businesses out there willing to spend thousands of $$$ per customer to run fiber in places where there already is a network run just to capture at best a 50% ratio of a $50 per month revenue business
No, it's not a long line. It's a very short line, but yes, they do have very good reason to do it. Google needs to do it because they own YouTube. They're in exactly the same position NetFlix was in. Comcast will be knocking at their door with their hand out any day now, if they haven't already. Google Fiber is about spending hundreds of dollars (not thousands) per customer to run fiber so they don't have to pay billions to Comcast over the next 10-20 years.
If Google doesn't choose 38 of 38 cities to roll out Google Fiber, instead of 9, they're fools. The Dane is going to come calling. They'd better have a convincing answer. 38 of 38 is about the right answer.
And if you weren't pretending that a single billionaire has more influence than a million voters....
A single billionaire has far more influence than any million voters. About 1000 times as much. A single billionaire has exactly zero arguments with himself over what his priorities are. A million voters have at least a million and one arguments over priorities. Guess which is the most influential opinion? A single billionaire has about 90% disposable income. A million voters are lucky to scrape together 10% disposable income among them, and many of that group have effectively 0%. Guess which is the most influential amount of money?
It's not pretend. It's quite real, and even a cursory examination of recent history turns up plenty of detailed examples.
Sodium-Sulfur is not even remotely suitable for home installation. It's a heat store, not an electrical store. To convert the heat back to electricity, you have to run a steam generator, and a steam generator small enough to fit in your basement is too inefficient to be worth building.
Nickel-iron is the ideal home storage chemistry. It does indeed tolerate exhaustive use and abuse, and can function for 100 years. There are original Edison cells still in use, still storing a useful amount of power. It's low density and slow to charge and discharge per cell, but since we're talking about sticking them in a cabinet in your basement, neither of those limitations is a problem. If your battery bank takes up the space of three refrigerators instead of two, you still don't really care. Nickel-iron is pretty dreadful for cars, but works great for fixed installations.
And possibly the density and discharge of nickel-iron could be improved my manufacturing them differently. So far, no one has ever made anything except a wet-cell nickel-iron battery. I bet a gel-cell version would be higher density, at least. And I have every confidence a good chemist could find a suitable gel-cell compound. Not easily or cheaply, but I'm sure it can be done. Nobody seems to be trying though.
We all may WANT to use the internet, but it is totally possible to live without it, at least currently.
Yeah, currently. Ask again in 5 years.
My state has online license plate renewal along with renewal in DMV offices. I'd bet money that online license plate renewal will be the only option in 5 years or less. Unemployment filing is done online. State income taxes are headed that way as well, as are state sales taxes. Interaction with government happens more and more over the Internet and that trend is accelerating. It's a natural response to the "prevent government from having money" people. Internet makes data processing cheap and efficient. Instead of paying for hundreds of DMV offices with thousands of staff, you pay for a couple of racks in a data center somewhere and a couple of web monkeys and database designers. My state has figured this out, and the rest will too. State governors talk to each other, you know.
It's not about emergency services. It's about every license you have to get. In the end, they'll ALL be online, right down to fishing licenses, and they'll actively prevent you from contacting a person by hiding phone numbers, because that's too expensive.
It's more like attempting to do a dozen full-length, theatre-released feature films based on the Silmarillion...
I for one would be delighted if they did that, money grab or no money grab. The nice thing about the Silmarillion is it's basically just Tolkien's collected backstory notes to himself. It's a miscellaneous pile of names and dates and the barest description of events. There are no characters with depth, no intricate plot lines, nothing I don't want to see raped and pillaged. (Rabbit sleight ride, anyone?) There are any number of basic plots that could be fleshed out and done as movies, and the results could be excellent.
A depiction of the War of Wrath against Morgoth and the end of the First Age done well would be a license to print money, and it would deserve the cash. Done badly, it would be a travesty, but that's a permanent hazard. It has everything. It has action. It has adventure. It has an epic battle. It has romance too, and it could be considerably less forced than the movie treatment of Aragorn and Arwen, since Luthien Tinuviel directly participated in the recovery of the lone Silmaril to be returned to the Valar. I wouldn't mind at all if they did that. If they can refrain from further fucking rabbits.
I dunno why China would want to censor NCIS. It depicts an armed federal agency violating the law and the Constitution with astonishing regularity and effectively with impunity (the Season 10 cliffhanger ending notwithstanding). From illegal wiretaps to illegal tracking to outright extrajudicial killings, it makes a mockery of law and order in the US. The Chinese government should be delighted.
I think you forgot the option of simply not watching the content. We are not talking about essential human needs here but entertainment.
Wrong.
Speaking as someone who was raised without a television, I can tell you it's about far more than entertainment. It's about culture. If you are not exposed to the same entertainment as the people around you, you are not part of the culture. And that's incredibly harmful. Yeah, it gives you a different perspective from everyone else, but guess what: despite all PBS propaganda to the contrary, differing perspectives are not appreciated. They are barely tolerated, and in a lot of places, not even that. The ability to see the same entertainment establishes points of commonality with other people, which are necessary for comfortable human interaction.
It's true this problem is much less pronounced today than it once was since the monolithic television culture has begun to show cracks, but it's far from gone. Internet memes are a manifestation of the same thing, but they're a poor substitute. Two people who have both seen Rage Guy can make references the other understands. But the total number of people who have seen Rage Guy is still far lower than the number who have seen NCIS. A glance at MemeBase is sufficient to show why. There are 10,000 Internet memes all trying to gain acceptance. The Internet mechanism that could replace the role of television in establishing culture is dead on arrival, already fractured into uselessness.
Shared experiences establish culture and culture eases communication. People who believe they should have the right to put an exclusive lock and a toll booth on media actively harm that process.
Just because you find the terms of a deal unreasonable it does not justify your illegal actions.
Yes it does. Their unreasonable deal locks me out of sharing the experience other people have had. It makes me different. Eventually, the longer it lasts, very different. And there are many parts of the world today where being that different is literally deadly. It was not so very long ago that was true everywhere in the world.
It isn't solved I assure you. EDI is useful but not easy or simple enough to be universally implemented.
I meant in terms of the message formats, not in terms of the existing EDI "solutions" (if a vendor says "solution" at you, run the other way). That's how to provide the requisite interoperability with existing EDI systems. Speak their language. That's specifically one of the wheels I wouldn't want to reinvent. No sense trying to design a whole new protocol when there are existing standards (even if they are the limp, gated standards everybody in the world except computer engineers seems to favor).
The idea would be to write an EDI extension for QuickBooks. Something light weight and as unobtrusive as possible that automatically interacts with an email address to send and receive data in EDI format while maintaining audit trails of incoming and outgoing messages and providing interfaces to compose and send outbound EDI data automatically assembled from QuickBooks as well as display inbound data, confirm the details with a user, and automatically integrate the results in QuickBooks. I saw some crap about how EDI is better thought of as a system than a data format, and that's all well and good, but I'm talking about minimizing the "system" part and enabling the data format.
I think we can safely assume that Intuit doesn't have a brain in their skull, so it will have to be done by a third party. More to the point, even if they did, it would probably end up being one of these horrific "solutions" that quickly becomes a process disaster. Better that someone else does it who isn't burdened with their idiot corporate culture.
Yep! Total chicken and egg problem though perhaps not an unsolvable one. You'd basically have to make something that is easy to start and easy to use and falls back gracefully for customers not using it yet. Plug in to popular accounting software packages and maybe a web interchange.
The standardized format part appears to be a solved problem. The Wikipedia article on EDI is rather sparse, but the standards evidently do exist. Rather too many of them, I'd say. Which one is actually likely to be useful for the majority of people? I can't tell from the article. (And naturally there's a gate-keeping committee who thinks they can charge $850 for ASCX12. What a joke.)
Extensions to QuickBooks does seem like the logical route to take. However, I personally have no interest in running a web interchange, especially since EDI via email and FTP are standardized. Given my allergy to "screw the customer as hard as possible" business models, I'd sooner write a system that takes advantage of communication systems businesses already have, rather than try to collect extra.
One of my clients continues to use QB Pro 2000 to this day.
That's a large part of the problem that I left unspoken. Finding an SDK for current versions is difficult enough, but a great many people refuse to play the upgrade game and are running one of the many many prior versions. Supporting enough of them to be useful makes the problem a great deal harder, especially when the upgrade treadmill means the vendors are intentionally eliminating access to SDKs for older versions.
Want to make a fortune? Come up with an EDI type system that doesn't cost an arm and leg and allows businesses to exchange invoices, delivery information, order acknowledgements, etc automatically between businesses of any size and that integrates with existing accounting systems. Start with Quickbooks and Sage.
I want to make a fortune, but when I looked, I found all links to PeachTree's SDK are dead.
And that right there is the reason why what you want doesn't exist and won't exist. The two businesses that own the accounting market for small and medium businesses are focused exclusively on maintaining an "upgrade" treadmill and milking you for all the money they can squeeze out of you. Making your job more efficient is not even an interest, let alone a priority.
I might be interested in adding EDI read and write capabilities to something like PostBooks (if it doesn't already have it), but Intuit and Sage's business models are toxic. I have no interest in chasing after annual cosmetic upgrades and squeezing through the tiny keyholes they set up around your data.
The IMF opinion is indeed nonsensical, but fossil fuels are subsidized.
In 2009:
Tenaska's Taylorville Energy Center – loan coverage $2.6 billion for a 730 MW coal-fired IGCC with CCS.
Leucadia's Indiana Gasification SNG project – loan coverage of $1.6 billion to produce Substitute Natural Gas (syngas) from coal for sale to customers in Indiana, with proposed carbon capture for enhanced oil recovery.
Leucadia's Mississippi Gasification SNG project – loan coverage of $1.689 billion to produce syngas from petroleum coke feedstock, for sale to electric utilities in the region, with proposed carbon capture for enhanced oil recovery.
Subsidies identical to the type received by Tesla and Solyndra both.
In July 2013, the US Department of Energy made available $8 billion in loan guarantees to the fossil fuel industry, again, the identical type of subsidy received by Tesla. For an industry that has been recording record profits for the past 6 years.
So either stop claiming Solyndra received a subsidy or stop claiming fossil fuel industries don't receive any. You can't have it both ways.
Why do so many people confuse weather with climate?
Because climate IS weather? It's just lots of it averaged over time. This winter is a valid data point that will drag down the average temperature for the decade, and that statistical behavior is perfectly acceptable. What did you think you were measuring, anyway? Tree rings?
You need massive banks of capacitors to store and then discharge that energy very rapidly. There is going to be a lot of heat generated. The lifetime of the capacitors and heat dissipation ability are probably the limiting factors.
On the plus side, you're floating on top of a very large, very agreeable heat sink.
Political litmus tests for employment have been a big no-no for a damn good reason.
Sure. In 9 states. In the other 41, it's legal. In Washington, California, Colorado, Michigan, New York, North Dakota, Oregon, Louisiana, and Florida it's illegal to fire someone for political activity or for not voting for your employer's preferred candidate, or for belonging to a particular party (one or more of those protections, depending on the state).
The linked blog post is by an employment attorney, so it's reasonably sure to be correct. Some states are more specific than others about what specific political activity can not be used to justify firing. Some extend protection to all activity. Others are specific only to voting. Your Republican in South Carolina example is perfectly legal.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh really? http://www.homedepot.com/p/Ame...
For the super-pedantic among us, he obviously meant "buy and install a functional flush toilet alone." Yes you can go to Home Depot and buy the porcelain (if you live in the US or another developed country that actually has such products on the shelf). No, you're not going to be able to connect it to either a water supply or a sewer line where there aren't either of those things. And there are plenty of places in the world where there are neither.
Pixar will have nothing in theaters this summer.
Pixar is Disney. Rest assured, Pixar releases will never again compete against Disney Animation Studios releases. Release dates will be exquisitely chosen to maximize revenue for each.
yes, long line of businesses out there willing to spend thousands of $$$ per customer to run fiber in places where there already is a network run just to capture at best a 50% ratio of a $50 per month revenue business
No, it's not a long line. It's a very short line, but yes, they do have very good reason to do it. Google needs to do it because they own YouTube. They're in exactly the same position NetFlix was in. Comcast will be knocking at their door with their hand out any day now, if they haven't already. Google Fiber is about spending hundreds of dollars (not thousands) per customer to run fiber so they don't have to pay billions to Comcast over the next 10-20 years.
If Google doesn't choose 38 of 38 cities to roll out Google Fiber, instead of 9, they're fools. The Dane is going to come calling. They'd better have a convincing answer. 38 of 38 is about the right answer.
Ask a snarky question, get a snarky answer.
And if you weren't pretending that a single billionaire has more influence than a million voters....
A single billionaire has far more influence than any million voters. About 1000 times as much. A single billionaire has exactly zero arguments with himself over what his priorities are. A million voters have at least a million and one arguments over priorities. Guess which is the most influential opinion? A single billionaire has about 90% disposable income. A million voters are lucky to scrape together 10% disposable income among them, and many of that group have effectively 0%. Guess which is the most influential amount of money?
It's not pretend. It's quite real, and even a cursory examination of recent history turns up plenty of detailed examples.
Sodium-Sulfur is not even remotely suitable for home installation. It's a heat store, not an electrical store. To convert the heat back to electricity, you have to run a steam generator, and a steam generator small enough to fit in your basement is too inefficient to be worth building.
Nickel-iron is the ideal home storage chemistry. It does indeed tolerate exhaustive use and abuse, and can function for 100 years. There are original Edison cells still in use, still storing a useful amount of power. It's low density and slow to charge and discharge per cell, but since we're talking about sticking them in a cabinet in your basement, neither of those limitations is a problem. If your battery bank takes up the space of three refrigerators instead of two, you still don't really care. Nickel-iron is pretty dreadful for cars, but works great for fixed installations.
And possibly the density and discharge of nickel-iron could be improved my manufacturing them differently. So far, no one has ever made anything except a wet-cell nickel-iron battery. I bet a gel-cell version would be higher density, at least. And I have every confidence a good chemist could find a suitable gel-cell compound. Not easily or cheaply, but I'm sure it can be done. Nobody seems to be trying though.
We all may WANT to use the internet, but it is totally possible to live without it, at least currently.
Yeah, currently. Ask again in 5 years.
My state has online license plate renewal along with renewal in DMV offices. I'd bet money that online license plate renewal will be the only option in 5 years or less. Unemployment filing is done online. State income taxes are headed that way as well, as are state sales taxes. Interaction with government happens more and more over the Internet and that trend is accelerating. It's a natural response to the "prevent government from having money" people. Internet makes data processing cheap and efficient. Instead of paying for hundreds of DMV offices with thousands of staff, you pay for a couple of racks in a data center somewhere and a couple of web monkeys and database designers. My state has figured this out, and the rest will too. State governors talk to each other, you know.
It's not about emergency services. It's about every license you have to get. In the end, they'll ALL be online, right down to fishing licenses, and they'll actively prevent you from contacting a person by hiding phone numbers, because that's too expensive.
It's more like attempting to do a dozen full-length, theatre-released feature films based on the Silmarillion...
I for one would be delighted if they did that, money grab or no money grab. The nice thing about the Silmarillion is it's basically just Tolkien's collected backstory notes to himself. It's a miscellaneous pile of names and dates and the barest description of events. There are no characters with depth, no intricate plot lines, nothing I don't want to see raped and pillaged. (Rabbit sleight ride, anyone?) There are any number of basic plots that could be fleshed out and done as movies, and the results could be excellent.
A depiction of the War of Wrath against Morgoth and the end of the First Age done well would be a license to print money, and it would deserve the cash. Done badly, it would be a travesty, but that's a permanent hazard. It has everything. It has action. It has adventure. It has an epic battle. It has romance too, and it could be considerably less forced than the movie treatment of Aragorn and Arwen, since Luthien Tinuviel directly participated in the recovery of the lone Silmaril to be returned to the Valar. I wouldn't mind at all if they did that. If they can refrain from further fucking rabbits.
I dunno why China would want to censor NCIS. It depicts an armed federal agency violating the law and the Constitution with astonishing regularity and effectively with impunity (the Season 10 cliffhanger ending notwithstanding). From illegal wiretaps to illegal tracking to outright extrajudicial killings, it makes a mockery of law and order in the US. The Chinese government should be delighted.
I think you forgot the option of simply not watching the content. We are not talking about essential human needs here but entertainment.
Wrong.
Speaking as someone who was raised without a television, I can tell you it's about far more than entertainment. It's about culture. If you are not exposed to the same entertainment as the people around you, you are not part of the culture. And that's incredibly harmful. Yeah, it gives you a different perspective from everyone else, but guess what: despite all PBS propaganda to the contrary, differing perspectives are not appreciated. They are barely tolerated, and in a lot of places, not even that. The ability to see the same entertainment establishes points of commonality with other people, which are necessary for comfortable human interaction.
It's true this problem is much less pronounced today than it once was since the monolithic television culture has begun to show cracks, but it's far from gone. Internet memes are a manifestation of the same thing, but they're a poor substitute. Two people who have both seen Rage Guy can make references the other understands. But the total number of people who have seen Rage Guy is still far lower than the number who have seen NCIS. A glance at MemeBase is sufficient to show why. There are 10,000 Internet memes all trying to gain acceptance. The Internet mechanism that could replace the role of television in establishing culture is dead on arrival, already fractured into uselessness.
Shared experiences establish culture and culture eases communication. People who believe they should have the right to put an exclusive lock and a toll booth on media actively harm that process.
Just because you find the terms of a deal unreasonable it does not justify your illegal actions.
Yes it does. Their unreasonable deal locks me out of sharing the experience other people have had. It makes me different. Eventually, the longer it lasts, very different. And there are many parts of the world today where being that different is literally deadly. It was not so very long ago that was true everywhere in the world.
No, it's not "just entertainment."
(In reference to Verizon's purchase of the 700mhz block A spectrum that they never got around to using)
They sold it to T-Mobile for $2.365 billion in January 2014.
Oh crap. There goes my afternoon.
Also all of your disposable income.
It isn't solved I assure you. EDI is useful but not easy or simple enough to be universally implemented.
I meant in terms of the message formats, not in terms of the existing EDI "solutions" (if a vendor says "solution" at you, run the other way). That's how to provide the requisite interoperability with existing EDI systems. Speak their language. That's specifically one of the wheels I wouldn't want to reinvent. No sense trying to design a whole new protocol when there are existing standards (even if they are the limp, gated standards everybody in the world except computer engineers seems to favor).
The idea would be to write an EDI extension for QuickBooks. Something light weight and as unobtrusive as possible that automatically interacts with an email address to send and receive data in EDI format while maintaining audit trails of incoming and outgoing messages and providing interfaces to compose and send outbound EDI data automatically assembled from QuickBooks as well as display inbound data, confirm the details with a user, and automatically integrate the results in QuickBooks. I saw some crap about how EDI is better thought of as a system than a data format, and that's all well and good, but I'm talking about minimizing the "system" part and enabling the data format.
I think we can safely assume that Intuit doesn't have a brain in their skull, so it will have to be done by a third party. More to the point, even if they did, it would probably end up being one of these horrific "solutions" that quickly becomes a process disaster. Better that someone else does it who isn't burdened with their idiot corporate culture.
Yep! Total chicken and egg problem though perhaps not an unsolvable one. You'd basically have to make something that is easy to start and easy to use and falls back gracefully for customers not using it yet. Plug in to popular accounting software packages and maybe a web interchange.
The standardized format part appears to be a solved problem. The Wikipedia article on EDI is rather sparse, but the standards evidently do exist. Rather too many of them, I'd say. Which one is actually likely to be useful for the majority of people? I can't tell from the article. (And naturally there's a gate-keeping committee who thinks they can charge $850 for ASCX12. What a joke.)
Extensions to QuickBooks does seem like the logical route to take. However, I personally have no interest in running a web interchange, especially since EDI via email and FTP are standardized. Given my allergy to "screw the customer as hard as possible" business models, I'd sooner write a system that takes advantage of communication systems businesses already have, rather than try to collect extra.
One of my clients continues to use QB Pro 2000 to this day.
That's a large part of the problem that I left unspoken. Finding an SDK for current versions is difficult enough, but a great many people refuse to play the upgrade game and are running one of the many many prior versions. Supporting enough of them to be useful makes the problem a great deal harder, especially when the upgrade treadmill means the vendors are intentionally eliminating access to SDKs for older versions.
I suspect a user ID that high isn't familiar with the meme.
Want to make a fortune? Come up with an EDI type system that doesn't cost an arm and leg and allows businesses to exchange invoices, delivery information, order acknowledgements, etc automatically between businesses of any size and that integrates with existing accounting systems. Start with Quickbooks and Sage.
I want to make a fortune, but when I looked, I found all links to PeachTree's SDK are dead.
And that right there is the reason why what you want doesn't exist and won't exist. The two businesses that own the accounting market for small and medium businesses are focused exclusively on maintaining an "upgrade" treadmill and milking you for all the money they can squeeze out of you. Making your job more efficient is not even an interest, let alone a priority.
I might be interested in adding EDI read and write capabilities to something like PostBooks (if it doesn't already have it), but Intuit and Sage's business models are toxic. I have no interest in chasing after annual cosmetic upgrades and squeezing through the tiny keyholes they set up around your data.
The short name for that is "fascism."
The IMF opinion is indeed nonsensical, but fossil fuels are subsidized.
In 2009:
Tenaska's Taylorville Energy Center – loan coverage $2.6 billion for a 730 MW coal-fired IGCC with CCS.
Leucadia's Indiana Gasification SNG project – loan coverage of $1.6 billion to produce Substitute Natural Gas (syngas) from coal for sale to customers in Indiana, with proposed carbon capture for enhanced oil recovery.
Leucadia's Mississippi Gasification SNG project – loan coverage of $1.689 billion to produce syngas from petroleum coke feedstock, for sale to electric utilities in the region, with proposed carbon capture for enhanced oil recovery.
Subsidies identical to the type received by Tesla and Solyndra both.
In July 2013, the US Department of Energy made available $8 billion in loan guarantees to the fossil fuel industry, again, the identical type of subsidy received by Tesla. For an industry that has been recording record profits for the past 6 years.
So either stop claiming Solyndra received a subsidy or stop claiming fossil fuel industries don't receive any. You can't have it both ways.
Why do so many people confuse weather with climate?
Because climate IS weather? It's just lots of it averaged over time. This winter is a valid data point that will drag down the average temperature for the decade, and that statistical behavior is perfectly acceptable. What did you think you were measuring, anyway? Tree rings?
First, pack at least couple solar powered calculators. You can get cheap scientific calculators at the dollar store.
The dollar store? My Ti-34 (that I still use) cost $74 you insensitive clod! (And it has pi to 9 decimal places as a built-in constant.)
... or protect them from the multi-million$ personal injury lawsuit from the impacted driver.
For once, an appropriate use of the marketing-monkey trick of substituting "impact" for "affect".
You need massive banks of capacitors to store and then discharge that energy very rapidly. There is going to be a lot of heat generated. The lifetime of the capacitors and heat dissipation ability are probably the limiting factors.
On the plus side, you're floating on top of a very large, very agreeable heat sink.
Political litmus tests for employment have been a big no-no for a damn good reason.
Sure. In 9 states. In the other 41, it's legal. In Washington, California, Colorado, Michigan, New York, North Dakota, Oregon, Louisiana, and Florida it's illegal to fire someone for political activity or for not voting for your employer's preferred candidate, or for belonging to a particular party (one or more of those protections, depending on the state).
The linked blog post is by an employment attorney, so it's reasonably sure to be correct. Some states are more specific than others about what specific political activity can not be used to justify firing. Some extend protection to all activity. Others are specific only to voting. Your Republican in South Carolina example is perfectly legal.
*air-punch*
I knew procrastinating Debian upgrades for most of a decade would pay off! I am VINDICATED!