Cameron is in the position that often leads to disaster - trying to top his previous record-breaking achievement. While he may have had to wait a dozen years for the technology to catch up with his story, that 12 years has also left his story behind. We've seen it before, evil white men with technology, greed and ambition seek to destroy the idyllic existence of the poor barefoot natives: Pocahontas, Fern Gully, Dances with Wolves, etc.
We got that message in 1995, and now it's just a re-tread of the same old politically-correct Hollywood system. When we raid the rainforest, it's as often for medicine, but Cameron's bad guys just want "minerals". Let's not give anyone a choice as to who's the bad guy here. Let's put that same washed-out blue tint on all the bad guy sets, seen in every dystopic SF story since Minority Report and before - a tired old cliche. However, the people will flock to Avatar in any case. A piece of shit movie like this year's Transformers is up to 400 Million in box office receipts, so there is little correlation between quality and commercial success.
There was and is a good reason to keep manned spacecraft in LEO. Radiation. Geosynchronous satellites are outside the protection of the Van Allen radiation belts, and any astronauts traveling outside that protection are subject to high doses of pretty nasty radiation under normal circumstances, and outright lethal doses when solar storms occur.
We still don't have a good solution to the radiation problem, which is one of the major obstacles to practical moon bases and Mars missions. Leave the satellite maintenance to robots. How about a robotic craft that could grab a satellite and ferry it to the ISS for repair? Now THAT'S a worthwhile mission...
I switched from XP to Windows 7 Beta x64. All worked very well except for problems related to x64 third party drivers. Then MS forced me to abandon the Beta for the Release Candidate, so I went with Windows 7 RC x32. The device driver problems went away, but instead I have multiple problems of various sorts. The DVD drive cannot be used as a write device (worked in the Beta). Printers install but none show up in the "Devices and Printers" list. Clicking on a folder in Explorer always opens a new window, in spite of the settings to the contrary. My camera is recognized as a USB device, but the automatic downloading function no longer works. When I activate it manually, it tells me I need a scanner. WTF! It feels like I've gone back to Windows 95. I've reported these problems on the MS forums, and in spite of also seeing other people with the same problems, MS hasn't bothered to respond.
It's just as illogical to assume that because there are two buckets that they are equal in every regard. For many issues, there is a right and wrong that goes beyond political and ideological labels. Arguing against what you perceive as immoral or wrong doesn't automatically make you a bigot or an ignoramus.
Just as people from a few thousand years ago couldn't imagine the world we have today, it's just as silly for us to write off a habitable earth. We have small communities living now in far more inhospitable places: Antarctica, ocean bottoms and LEO. Who's to say what technological capabilities we will have in thousands more years? Perhaps a satellite orbiting the Sun that eclipses enough solar radiation to keep temperatures under control. Or nanoparticles added to the atmosphere for the same effect. Or a future propulsion system that can simply change the orbit of the Earth over thousands of years to correct for increased solar emissions. Or a way to affect the nuclear reaction inside the Sun itself. In 500,000 years, that may be child's play.
Most of those issues can be handled by more advanced systems in electric-only platforms. Most gas-powered cars have massively oversized heating and cooling systems, and they leak like a sieve. In a gas vehicle, that's a good thing since there is always surplus heat to remove, and there are exhaust gasses to be dealt with, and moving tons of air through the system is a cheap way to deal with it. Electric car systems can recirculate more cabin air, and remember there's not a boiling hot chunk of metal sitting right in front of your feet, and that hot exhaust system and catalytic converter running below the cabin.
As for emergency charging, who's to say that future road service vehicles won't be equipped with quick chargers? At home, the charge rate is limited by a number of factors. The main charge circuit is typically limited to a single 120 or 240 VAC circuit, at 20, 30 or MAYBE 50A. Any more and too many houses couldn't handle the charging. Plus, your daily charger has to be user-friendly and be able to run safely unattended. An emergency charger, used by trained personnel, could pump much more energy into the batteries, so I'd expect in a few years that you could get about a half-way charge in the time that it would take to change a tire. Not a big problem.
The problem that I see with solar is what I'd call the pie slice problem. Right now, you take the new car buyers, and slice the pie based on the current limitations of electric cars. Commute too long? Cut out that slice. Wicked hot or cold? They're out too. Not feasible to install a charger at your home (e.g. apartment dwellers)? Cut out that slice of the market. Can't afford the extra expense of the vehicle? Need to haul cargo periodically? Worried about ongoing costs of the battery system? Don't always return to your home base? Suspicious of new technology? All of these and more trim down the slice of the electric car to very small numbers. Some of those issues will be resolved, but some others never will. Unless there's a major technical breakthrough, electric vehicles will never be widely adopted.
More wishful thinking that man's slightest activity can cause changes on a global scale. The numbers don't add up. Sure, that's a lot of tons of water vapor sent up a couple of times a year, but compared to the volume of the hemisphere's atmosphere, it's virtually nothing. Add to that the osmotic pressures that cause dilution, supersonic currents that dissipate the vapor, and the movement of the ship itself which leaves just a slender tendril through the air. Now we are expected to believe that this water vapor hangs together and goes off to Antarctica and Alaska to form distinctive clouds?
I don't blame them for passing. I installed the Windows 7 Beta when it was first released, and it worked very well. My main mistake was installing the 64 bit version, which had inadequate driver support for some exotic hardware that I have. Microsoft killed off the Beta for the Release Candidate at the beginning of the month, so beta users were forced to re-install the new Windows RC. I expected some of the minor UI issues to be resolved, but instead there are some major new problems. Key issues now are no printers being shown in the control panel, non-working camera image capture (throws an error that a SCANNER is required), Folder settings that don't work, and issues with applications that just don't support Vista or beyond (a Roland ColorCamm printer and the Eclipse IDE for me).
So today I officially give up on WIndows 7 and I'm reverting back to XP for the foreseeable future. The shiny wrapper is just not worth the rancid crud underneath.
Just because there may be a few large stations that play the kind of music that you are interested in, it doesn't mean that everyone would be satisfied with the available selections. Would you make the same argument about movies or books? Sure, if you're main interest in radio is top 20 hits, you don't have to search for smaller stations (an no smaller stations would bother with such a generic playlist). But for many, the hunt for the ideal music station is part of the fun. Terrestrial radio is a vast wasteland of narrow genres and pre-packaged Clear Channel swill. And many don't want to see the same thing happen to Internet radio.
Perusing the info on SoundExchange, the wording is ambiguous. In the press release, they clearly say that all "Pure Play" webcasters, small and large, are subject to the $25,000 per year minimum fee against royalties. But in another section of the web site, they list the $25,000 fee in the section for large webcasters and say nothing about a minimum fee in the following section about small broadcasters. So there's a chance that the fee may not apply to small webcasters.
It should also be said that this "special deal" is opt-in, and not compulsory. Webcasters are still free to adopt the rate structure established earlier by the CRB, however it was those rates that caused the revolt by webcasters in the first place, since those rates are so high that a typical small station could end up owing over 100% of revenues to Sound Exchange.
Real-world payback on silicon cells is 10+ years. Please cite your 1-3 year projection. You can't go by a best-case full-sun cell output vs. municipal kWH charges. And unless you build a battery-backed/generator system around it, nuclear will beat it on any cloudy day and every night.
Highly specialized applications such as yours are rarely marketed successfully by outsiders. Some strategic keyword buys might boost your web traffic, but unless your site is set up to sell, you won't convert enough sales to make the effort worthwhile. So first you should have a professional-quality e-commerce site set up for your product. If you can't do that yourself, it's something that you need to pay for.
After that, you can drive traffic to your site with keyword buys, maybe small ads in journals. Send press releases to any of the journals or magazines that apply to your application.
But I think that you'll find that the most effective thing will be for you to establish a personal presence on the Internet, and to link that presence to your product's web site. Are there USENET newsgroups or web-hosted forums for people that could use your program? Don't just spam the forums, but participate genuinely in the discussions. Of course, your sig must have a link to your web site (the name of which should minimally define the product). Share your personal expertise in the specialized field your software addresses, and it will reflect positively on the product. You could also set up your own forum, but without a means to attract users it would probably languish.
Finally, look to conferences and conventions applicable to your product. Many (but not all) of those conferences are quite willing to let you give a seminar or poster session for an application using your product. Purely academic conferences usually don't allow this type of semi-commercialism, but many others do. The good part about giving a talk, seminar or workshop is that you usually get into the conference free as a VIP, and you don't have the expense of purchasing or manning a booth. Running a booth at NAMM, AES or other major shows is not feasible unless you already have substantial sales.
When the MJ news first hit, one of the early sites handling the rumor was TMZ.COM. I was on the page before CNN and other sources had reported MJ dead. The TMZ page automatically loaded a streaming video window with live reports of the ongoing story. I left the page open while I attended to other matters, and other than the video blanking out now and then, the stream was stable for hours. I was thinking to myself that surely this story would overload their servers, what with the home page automatically generating a live video stream, but it just never happened.
It used to be so unlucky to have 13 people at a gathering, that there were people that you could call to attend your event just to avoid that situation. They were called "quatorziens". I'm sure there would be lots of volunteers here for that position on the ISS, and in space, you don't need to worry about running out of chairs.
There are a large number of people who have been forced into Google Groups by losing their ISP's Usenet service who are not satisfied with Google Groups and are looking for "low-cost alternatives". If Google Groups was so superior, this thread would not exist.
Yes, there are a few places where Usenet is the main place for discussions. One such place is rec.games.pinball, which often has over 1000 posts per day. There is no web-based forum that reaches anywhere near as many people as RGP. There's a thread there today about the very subject of AT&T dropping Usenet. Many people use web-based Google Groups, but there are often interruptions in service and the web-based interface is much clunkier than most dedicated newsreaders.
The newbies on RGP are almost always coming in through Google Groups (as is virtually all of the spam), and the newbies rarely have any concept of Usenet at all.
When you are hoarding diamonds or real estate, your hoard has an innate value to you. When you hoard domains, your hoard has no innate value. Your squatted domains have no value to you, only to other people that you have beaten to the punch. It's those people that consider the domains valuable, and now they must pay your extortion in order to get what you have taken for no other reason than extortion.
I had a domain that I had gotten in anticipation of starting an on-line service that would use it. I never got around to working on that business, and someone approached me to obtain the domain. We negotiated a fair price (way less than $1000) and the deal was done. In this case, I sold an idle business asset. A more appropriate analogy to cybersquatting would be a guy who takes all the free meals at a soup kitchen and then sells them to the hungry to the highest bidder.
Heathkit sold two different analog computers: the EC-1 and H-1. They were sold for educational purposes rather than any practical application, but I'd suspect that they out-sold any other analog computers (with the possible exception of military applications of analog computers in artillery or bomb sights).
So you had no indication that your credentials were being stored improperly, but you dumped FireFTP anyway? If you were worried about vulnerable FTP credentials, all you had to do was delete them after you were done, or delete the plug-in in between uses (it's fast and easy to re-install). But I guess you like to punish yourself.
Incidentally, the command line FTP program is just as vulnerable to the exploit in TFA. A security hole in unpatched Adobe software (i.e. Flash player, PDF viewer) installs spyware that captures your FTP traffic, and as we all know, FTP log-in credentials are sent in clear text. If you really care about security, you shouldn't be using naked FTP at all.
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Wellll, my S-100 has a Z-80, as did most in the end.
Cameron is in the position that often leads to disaster - trying to top his previous record-breaking achievement. While he may have had to wait a dozen years for the technology to catch up with his story, that 12 years has also left his story behind. We've seen it before, evil white men with technology, greed and ambition seek to destroy the idyllic existence of the poor barefoot natives: Pocahontas, Fern Gully, Dances with Wolves, etc.
We got that message in 1995, and now it's just a re-tread of the same old politically-correct Hollywood system. When we raid the rainforest, it's as often for medicine, but Cameron's bad guys just want "minerals". Let's not give anyone a choice as to who's the bad guy here. Let's put that same washed-out blue tint on all the bad guy sets, seen in every dystopic SF story since Minority Report and before - a tired old cliche. However, the people will flock to Avatar in any case. A piece of shit movie like this year's Transformers is up to 400 Million in box office receipts, so there is little correlation between quality and commercial success.
There was and is a good reason to keep manned spacecraft in LEO. Radiation. Geosynchronous satellites are outside the protection of the Van Allen radiation belts, and any astronauts traveling outside that protection are subject to high doses of pretty nasty radiation under normal circumstances, and outright lethal doses when solar storms occur.
We still don't have a good solution to the radiation problem, which is one of the major obstacles to practical moon bases and Mars missions. Leave the satellite maintenance to robots. How about a robotic craft that could grab a satellite and ferry it to the ISS for repair? Now THAT'S a worthwhile mission...
I switched from XP to Windows 7 Beta x64. All worked very well except for problems related to x64 third party drivers. Then MS forced me to abandon the Beta for the Release Candidate, so I went with Windows 7 RC x32. The device driver problems went away, but instead I have multiple problems of various sorts. The DVD drive cannot be used as a write device (worked in the Beta). Printers install but none show up in the "Devices and Printers" list. Clicking on a folder in Explorer always opens a new window, in spite of the settings to the contrary. My camera is recognized as a USB device, but the automatic downloading function no longer works. When I activate it manually, it tells me I need a scanner. WTF! It feels like I've gone back to Windows 95. I've reported these problems on the MS forums, and in spite of also seeing other people with the same problems, MS hasn't bothered to respond.
It's just as illogical to assume that because there are two buckets that they are equal in every regard. For many issues, there is a right and wrong that goes beyond political and ideological labels. Arguing against what you perceive as immoral or wrong doesn't automatically make you a bigot or an ignoramus.
Just as people from a few thousand years ago couldn't imagine the world we have today, it's just as silly for us to write off a habitable earth. We have small communities living now in far more inhospitable places: Antarctica, ocean bottoms and LEO. Who's to say what technological capabilities we will have in thousands more years? Perhaps a satellite orbiting the Sun that eclipses enough solar radiation to keep temperatures under control. Or nanoparticles added to the atmosphere for the same effect. Or a future propulsion system that can simply change the orbit of the Earth over thousands of years to correct for increased solar emissions. Or a way to affect the nuclear reaction inside the Sun itself. In 500,000 years, that may be child's play.
Built in the exact proportions of 1, 4, 9 - the square of the first three integers. And of course this doesn't stop after just three dimensions...
Most of those issues can be handled by more advanced systems in electric-only platforms. Most gas-powered cars have massively oversized heating and cooling systems, and they leak like a sieve. In a gas vehicle, that's a good thing since there is always surplus heat to remove, and there are exhaust gasses to be dealt with, and moving tons of air through the system is a cheap way to deal with it. Electric car systems can recirculate more cabin air, and remember there's not a boiling hot chunk of metal sitting right in front of your feet, and that hot exhaust system and catalytic converter running below the cabin.
As for emergency charging, who's to say that future road service vehicles won't be equipped with quick chargers? At home, the charge rate is limited by a number of factors. The main charge circuit is typically limited to a single 120 or 240 VAC circuit, at 20, 30 or MAYBE 50A. Any more and too many houses couldn't handle the charging. Plus, your daily charger has to be user-friendly and be able to run safely unattended. An emergency charger, used by trained personnel, could pump much more energy into the batteries, so I'd expect in a few years that you could get about a half-way charge in the time that it would take to change a tire. Not a big problem.
The problem that I see with solar is what I'd call the pie slice problem. Right now, you take the new car buyers, and slice the pie based on the current limitations of electric cars. Commute too long? Cut out that slice. Wicked hot or cold? They're out too. Not feasible to install a charger at your home (e.g. apartment dwellers)? Cut out that slice of the market. Can't afford the extra expense of the vehicle? Need to haul cargo periodically? Worried about ongoing costs of the battery system? Don't always return to your home base? Suspicious of new technology? All of these and more trim down the slice of the electric car to very small numbers. Some of those issues will be resolved, but some others never will. Unless there's a major technical breakthrough, electric vehicles will never be widely adopted.
More wishful thinking that man's slightest activity can cause changes on a global scale. The numbers don't add up. Sure, that's a lot of tons of water vapor sent up a couple of times a year, but compared to the volume of the hemisphere's atmosphere, it's virtually nothing. Add to that the osmotic pressures that cause dilution, supersonic currents that dissipate the vapor, and the movement of the ship itself which leaves just a slender tendril through the air. Now we are expected to believe that this water vapor hangs together and goes off to Antarctica and Alaska to form distinctive clouds?
Less esoteric was the SEX (sign extend X) opcode of the 6809, which we tried to use at every opportunity.
I don't blame them for passing. I installed the Windows 7 Beta when it was first released, and it worked very well. My main mistake was installing the 64 bit version, which had inadequate driver support for some exotic hardware that I have. Microsoft killed off the Beta for the Release Candidate at the beginning of the month, so beta users were forced to re-install the new Windows RC. I expected some of the minor UI issues to be resolved, but instead there are some major new problems. Key issues now are no printers being shown in the control panel, non-working camera image capture (throws an error that a SCANNER is required), Folder settings that don't work, and issues with applications that just don't support Vista or beyond (a Roland ColorCamm printer and the Eclipse IDE for me).
So today I officially give up on WIndows 7 and I'm reverting back to XP for the foreseeable future. The shiny wrapper is just not worth the rancid crud underneath.
Just because there may be a few large stations that play the kind of music that you are interested in, it doesn't mean that everyone would be satisfied with the available selections. Would you make the same argument about movies or books? Sure, if you're main interest in radio is top 20 hits, you don't have to search for smaller stations (an no smaller stations would bother with such a generic playlist). But for many, the hunt for the ideal music station is part of the fun. Terrestrial radio is a vast wasteland of narrow genres and pre-packaged Clear Channel swill. And many don't want to see the same thing happen to Internet radio.
Perusing the info on SoundExchange, the wording is ambiguous. In the press release, they clearly say that all "Pure Play" webcasters, small and large, are subject to the $25,000 per year minimum fee against royalties. But in another section of the web site, they list the $25,000 fee in the section for large webcasters and say nothing about a minimum fee in the following section about small broadcasters. So there's a chance that the fee may not apply to small webcasters.
It should also be said that this "special deal" is opt-in, and not compulsory. Webcasters are still free to adopt the rate structure established earlier by the CRB, however it was those rates that caused the revolt by webcasters in the first place, since those rates are so high that a typical small station could end up owing over 100% of revenues to Sound Exchange.
Real-world payback on silicon cells is 10+ years. Please cite your 1-3 year projection. You can't go by a best-case full-sun cell output vs. municipal kWH charges. And unless you build a battery-backed/generator system around it, nuclear will beat it on any cloudy day and every night.
Highly specialized applications such as yours are rarely marketed successfully by outsiders. Some strategic keyword buys might boost your web traffic, but unless your site is set up to sell, you won't convert enough sales to make the effort worthwhile. So first you should have a professional-quality e-commerce site set up for your product. If you can't do that yourself, it's something that you need to pay for.
After that, you can drive traffic to your site with keyword buys, maybe small ads in journals. Send press releases to any of the journals or magazines that apply to your application.
But I think that you'll find that the most effective thing will be for you to establish a personal presence on the Internet, and to link that presence to your product's web site. Are there USENET newsgroups or web-hosted forums for people that could use your program? Don't just spam the forums, but participate genuinely in the discussions. Of course, your sig must have a link to your web site (the name of which should minimally define the product). Share your personal expertise in the specialized field your software addresses, and it will reflect positively on the product. You could also set up your own forum, but without a means to attract users it would probably languish.
Finally, look to conferences and conventions applicable to your product. Many (but not all) of those conferences are quite willing to let you give a seminar or poster session for an application using your product. Purely academic conferences usually don't allow this type of semi-commercialism, but many others do. The good part about giving a talk, seminar or workshop is that you usually get into the conference free as a VIP, and you don't have the expense of purchasing or manning a booth. Running a booth at NAMM, AES or other major shows is not feasible unless you already have substantial sales.
When the MJ news first hit, one of the early sites handling the rumor was TMZ.COM. I was on the page before CNN and other sources had reported MJ dead. The TMZ page automatically loaded a streaming video window with live reports of the ongoing story. I left the page open while I attended to other matters, and other than the video blanking out now and then, the stream was stable for hours. I was thinking to myself that surely this story would overload their servers, what with the home page automatically generating a live video stream, but it just never happened.
It used to be so unlucky to have 13 people at a gathering, that there were people that you could call to attend your event just to avoid that situation. They were called "quatorziens". I'm sure there would be lots of volunteers here for that position on the ISS, and in space, you don't need to worry about running out of chairs.
There are a large number of people who have been forced into Google Groups by losing their ISP's Usenet service who are not satisfied with Google Groups and are looking for "low-cost alternatives". If Google Groups was so superior, this thread would not exist.
Yes, there are a few places where Usenet is the main place for discussions. One such place is rec.games.pinball, which often has over 1000 posts per day. There is no web-based forum that reaches anywhere near as many people as RGP. There's a thread there today about the very subject of AT&T dropping Usenet. Many people use web-based Google Groups, but there are often interruptions in service and the web-based interface is much clunkier than most dedicated newsreaders.
The newbies on RGP are almost always coming in through Google Groups (as is virtually all of the spam), and the newbies rarely have any concept of Usenet at all.
Damn them. I'll post whatever I w
When you are hoarding diamonds or real estate, your hoard has an innate value to you. When you hoard domains, your hoard has no innate value. Your squatted domains have no value to you, only to other people that you have beaten to the punch. It's those people that consider the domains valuable, and now they must pay your extortion in order to get what you have taken for no other reason than extortion.
I had a domain that I had gotten in anticipation of starting an on-line service that would use it. I never got around to working on that business, and someone approached me to obtain the domain. We negotiated a fair price (way less than $1000) and the deal was done. In this case, I sold an idle business asset. A more appropriate analogy to cybersquatting would be a guy who takes all the free meals at a soup kitchen and then sells them to the hungry to the highest bidder.
Heathkit sold two different analog computers: the EC-1 and H-1. They were sold for educational purposes rather than any practical application, but I'd suspect that they out-sold any other analog computers (with the possible exception of military applications of analog computers in artillery or bomb sights).
To cause it or prevent it?
So you had no indication that your credentials were being stored improperly, but you dumped FireFTP anyway? If you were worried about vulnerable FTP credentials, all you had to do was delete them after you were done, or delete the plug-in in between uses (it's fast and easy to re-install). But I guess you like to punish yourself.
Incidentally, the command line FTP program is just as vulnerable to the exploit in TFA. A security hole in unpatched Adobe software (i.e. Flash player, PDF viewer) installs spyware that captures your FTP traffic, and as we all know, FTP log-in credentials are sent in clear text. If you really care about security, you shouldn't be using naked FTP at all.
460 pounds. That makes it 208.656755845 kilograms, right?