While I could have worded that better, I think you're missing my point.
Your point is apparently not related to what you wrote.
What if you were paying someone by a set rate to get a project done.
An example of this is you take your car down to the garage to get a tune up. The mechanic says it will be $100 and it'll be ready at the end of the day. Now if he spends the next 4 hours doing crossword puzzles, it's no concern of yours as long as your car is ready at the end of the day. You're paying a set amount ($100) to get the project done in the specified timeframe (end of the business day). Anything beyond that is not in your contract.
Possibly what you are trying to say is you hired a mechanic to put in an 8 hour shift and focus on tuning up your car. While he is dedicated to your project, you are paying for his time and not specific performance. Which means you could reallocate his time to another project if something of higher priority came up or your tune up took less time than expected. Under these circumstance that 4 hours of crossword puzzles is your concern.
Maybe that isn't the chart you intended to link, because that is NOT what it says. If that was the correct link, then you need a refresher on the difference between revenue vs spending deficits and debt. What that chart does show is revenue and spending as a percentage of GDP. From 1990 through 2001 Federal government spending as a percentage of GDP was dropping. And 1998 through 2001 revenue exceeded spending. (budget surplus)
But the agency that keeps track of our debt, the US Treasury, says we still managed to increase our debt each of those years: 1998 113,046,997,500 1999 130,077,892,718 2000 17,907,308,271 2001 133,285,202,313
It sure would be nice to have that kind of deficit now....
What if you were paying someone by a set rate to get a project done. Would you want to pay them for that 20% of the time that they would be using to do nothing towards your project?
If you are paying a set rate, then technically you aren't paying for ANYTHING beyond the delivery of your project. You aren't paying for time, you are paying for performance. It doesn't matter if they spend 10 hours a week or 100 hours a week on your project if they meet the deadline.
It'll only be a financial burden if lending dries up. Otherwise they'll just pass it along to their children like the generations before them. There hasn't been a reduction in national debt since Eisenhower was in office, and we were in the low billions of debt.
Note that he didn't say he was 20,000 feet from a DSLAM, he is 20,000 feet from a CO. It's quite common for Telcos to run fiber to a neighborhood and then install a DSLAM. In my old neighborhood they ran fiber to the neighborhoods in the early 90s because they were running out of copper pairs. Back when modems and fax machines were booming. To upgrade to DSL they just upgraded the cabinets/huts with DSLAMs.
OTOH, just because you are close enough doesn't mean they can provide DSL. In the mid 90's I lived in an apartment complex that had a phone cabinet on the premises. At that time I couldn't get DSL because, although I was within the length limit to the CO, they ran fiber to the complex and then copper to the apartments. Bell didn't feel that the complex would support a DSLAM, so we all went with Roadrunner.
The problem is that people who have debt piling up are under pressure to just get their degree and start working,
Why would they be under any pressure to graduate due to debt? The loans are subsidized and interest doesn't start accruing until they go into repayment. Granted, it's been a couple decades ago, but I knew people in college that were planning to go on and get a Masters simply because as long as they stayed in school they weren't accruing interest and didn't have to make payments. And they knew they had a better chance of earning the advanced degree then rather than leaving school after their Bachelor's and trying to come back once they had jobs, families, mortgages, etc.
The pressure only comes after you graduate and see what the job market has to offer.
... are re-classified as no longer needing to be prescribed, insurance companies stop covering the cost of such drugs
In most cases, but not always. If the drug is available both with a prescription and without, your insurance will pay if you have the prescription. Insulin is an excellent example. Oddly, I can buy insulin without a prescription cheaper than I can with one. I pay either way since I'm on an HRA with a $1500 deductible, so I buy without even though I have the prescription. Syringes and test strips are the same and next year I'm readjusting my FSA to take the insurance co. completely out of the equation for them.
That would be a $30 fee for each jurisdiction, not one $30 fee for every agency worldwide.
So, $30 from every local law enforcement branch.
Follow the links to the actual document. That's $30 per month from an individual agency per telephone number, and only ones requested through their web site. Otherwise it's $20 for each request. It's not like they are sending a bill to every law enforcement agency in the country every month.
AT&T requires you to 'activate' their 911 tool for $100 and then $25 a day. And TMobile just charges $100 a day. So I guess if you have lots of people you want to track, hope they are on AT&T or TMobile and get a volume discount.
It's not a cash cow, but they do get reimbursed for costs. It's part of the provisions of CALEA that forces them to make information available to Law Enforcement. I would guess that their problems with this include;
they don't want 50 different sets of rules for providing each piece of data,
they want to make sure what 'location' refers to (IE. billing address, current location of your handset, last good location ping of your handset, tower that your handset has last communicated with, etc, etc),
and what are the rules for requiring a warrant.(can they give the 911 operator the location of the missing child's cell phone without one?)
And no, requiring a warrant will not reduce the number of requests, they are rarely turned down. Actually, I would be surprised if the Telcos weren't already requiring subpoenas for 99% of what is covered by this bill.
So the communities at large decide that there is a need to have restaurant inspections.
Restaurant inspections are already handled by local government. What the federal government regulates is the quality and inspections of the food supply so that beef raised in Montana for restaurants in New York meet health and quality guidelines. IE. covered by the commerce clause of the constitution. I suppose that Montana beef sold in Montana stores could be allowed to bypass the USDA, but consumers already prefer otherwise.
Particularly with food it would be a hard sell to get the general population to ask for less inspections.
I had an S-Blazer with a 2.8L gasoline engine. It was horribly underpowered...
The fuel injected 2.8l only had 125hp, the carb'd only 110hp. I had a 1st gen S10 truck with a carb'd 2.8 for years that had plenty of power, but it was also 2 wheel drive standard cab and lighter than the blazers. And I had an S15 with the 2.5 for a couple years. Even though it was only rated at 92hp, it drove about as well as the 2.8 because it was injected. And of course, the 2.5 was new and my 2.8 had 180k miles on it. Neither compares with the FI 4.3l though.
I'm looking to repower a 2nd gen 2.2l 5spd extended cab truck. They came from the factory with ~120hp. I know from driving my Jetta that it's 1.9 would not be suitable for that truck without using a rear end gear ratio that would kill highway fuel economy. And even though Wikipedia says the 1.9 has 105hp, my owners manual says 90hp. Maybe one of the newer 2.0l TDIs would work, they apparently come in 140 and 170hp. 170 is putting you in the 4.3l range. But I don't think those are mechanical diesels and I like the dependability of my 1.9l and 7.3l mechanical diesels. It's also a more difficult swap having to deal with ECUs that weren't designed to run in non VW chassis.
BTW, the results he got from the Vanagon wouldn't be suitable for me. Top end was 78 mph, and I drive on the Interstate where traffic regularly runs 75-80. I'd either have to run it at maximum output or get used to having someone 10 feet off of my back bumper all the time. I'm also less than impressed that it couldn't maintain speed on a 6% grade. The Grapevine is steep, but I wouldn't be interested in doing a mediocre repower.
There is also the Jetta TDI. Used ones aren't cheap, but they are out there. I have one in my driveway right next to my 7.3 F350. It would be nice to have more options out there, I'd like to repower an S10. The Cummins 4BT is too big, and I think the VW 1.9 is going to be too small. The 1.9 would be a really nice engine if it had a timing chain (instead of the belt) and the IP was a little cheaper to rebuild.
Fracking: The problem isn't the process itself, it's the waste water.
There is also concern with chemicals migrating through these newly created fractures into aquifers. Those chemicals may come from fracking process or they might come from the petroleum reserves.
Gas and Hydrogen: I think they are steps in the right direction. My understanding is the range on a heavy truck with LNG is 600+ miles. There's already over 100,000 busses and fleet trucks using LNG.
These are mostly large fleets working out of a centralized terminal. (Trained staff in a controlled environment refueling vehicles) If you can't roll out a North American infrastructure, you're limiting the usefulness of many of these trucks you want to convert. OTR trucking's advantage is they can take the most efficient route, directly to your door. If you limit them to specific corridors due to fuel availability, then they have no advantage over trains. And while range is a factor of fuel tank size, you need to increase that to 1500-2000 miles to be taken seriously in the OTR industry.
And while you are at it, you need to make sure the fuel cost per mile is similar or lower than diesel, all within emissions guidelines, and get a whole army of mechanics trained on these new engines. We're talking about an industry that will buy a roller (new truck with no engine) and transplant a known drive-train combination when the gov't starts monkeying with emission standards. They aren't going to make this drastic of a change over night. These aren't bleeding edge kind of people, not when fuel costs and equipment reliability is such a huge part of whether they earn any money.
The resource belongs to whoever holds the mineral rights.
Except the US Federal government owns a lot of the 'land' that oil companies are exploiting. All that oil that BP released into the Gulf, owned by US citizens. The North Shore and ANWR, owned by US citizens. Taxing is the wrong terminology though. The question that we should be asking is; are the royalty payments high enough?
If you wanted to lower gas prices in the US you would pass the Pickens Plan
IMO, just it being a 'Pickens Plan' is a good reason to give it a very close inspection. After how he wanted to use windmill leases to acquire water rights. There are also concerns about the extensive use of fracking now being done by the petroleum industry. And in the end we have just substituted one fossil fuel for another one.
to convert comercial semi's to Natural Gas
BTU per pound are pretty close to the same, but I have to wonder what effect the fuel storage will have on that equation. Are the pressure tanks for the natural gas going to offset all the fuel weight savings? What effect will this have on refueling times and safety? If the goal is moving commercial trucks off of petroleum diesel, biodiesel can be used without requiring large changes to existing engines. Biodiesel would have been a better approach than Ethanol in the big renewable push a few years back, the feedstocks are better and the process is more efficient. As far as that goes, with some modifications to the fuel delivery system, diesel engines can run pure vegetable oil. Making the fuel 'refining' process not much more complicated than smashing beans.
So if we're going to push natural gas we might as well collect and distribute hydrogen the same time.
Hydrogen has an excellent BTU:pound ratio. But many of the same storage issues that you have for hydrogen cars you have in hydrogen trucks. Hydrogen for aircraft or trains maybe? In those cases you could afford high quality storage equipment and professional handlers.
Sprint will end up with a faster network, particularly in major cities, than Verizon, and competitive coverage elsewhere.
Technically, they will have a higher capacity network. Not necessarily faster. For illustration, a single user on a 2500 tower might get 1/100th of it's capacity. So even though you're using 100% of your bandwidth, you wouldn't see a slowdown until user 101. Verizon Wireless, running down on 700 may only be able to support 20 users on a tower before their speed starts slowing down.
Note: the 100 and 20 are numbers I pulled out of my ass.
You do realize they sold many WiMax phones with the understanding that they would build out the WiMax network. They did very little WiMax expansion. Was that the plan all along or poor planning?
The expectation was that they would build out WiMax so far ahead of LTE that it would be the dominant 4G, or at least no worse than the GSM/CDMA divide. At the time they chose WiMax, LTE wasn't finished and could not have been used. Had Clearwire not dropped the ball on rolling out new markets, Clear/Sprint would be in the position that Verizon Wireless is now. And remember, Sprint wasn't responsible for expansion, Clearwire is handling their 4g network.
Was it's Sprint's fault for not being a bottomless ATM? Someone underestimated the cost of rolling out a 2.5Ghz network, and Sprint owns a significant percentage of Clearwire. Sprint should have known the cost. Lack of $$$ is letting Verizon Wireless stomp all over them in the number of markets deployed. But when it comes to capacity there is no way VW's 700Mhz spectrum will handle any where near as much traffic as Clear's 2.5Ghz. Of course, by the time we see that Clear will have LTE on their towers with, or in place of WiMax. The direction they are choosing they will be able to support both.
For Sprint, if they get their LTE rolled out on 1900 (?), they will be able to cover the same markets they do with CDMA (same towers) and use Clear for high capacity in big markets.
I'd argue that they aren't betting the business on iPhone, they are betting the business on Network Vision. The big change here is that they are no longer depending on someone else to provide their core 4G network.
Correction: She died because the driver was drunk AND the paparazzi were hounding them contributing to speed and distraction AND she wasn't wearing a seat belt
As despicable as some of the paparazzi can be, they did not contribute to the speed. They weren't endangering her safety by taking pictures, and even if they were, speeding off would not have been the correct response. Going back inside and calling the police would have been better. Her driver, pure and simple made the decisions that were responsible for the crash. If OJ proved nothing else, he proved that being chased does not put any obligation on you to drive fast.
But It's politics, there's no need to upgrade the office for the NEXT GUY.
You're making the assumption that the Whitehouse doesn't have a professional, apolitical, IT staff. The building is maintained by the GSA, the maintenance and janitorial staff isn't changed at the whim of an incoming president. The same for the kitchen staff. Why would the IT staff change from administration to administration?
That would be Slick Willie, or Bubba. It was intended to be derogatory. And if you are a little older than the average Slashdotter, you will remember "Tricky Dick" Nixon. Poor Jimmy was just "The Peanut Farmer".
I'll take dealing with the driver's license bureau (DMV) over Verizon Wireless or Time Warner Cable any day. Comcast wasn't rude, just incompetent.
Re:That's why I like the basic Kindle
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The eBook Backlash
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· Score: 2
Have you tried using Calibre to convert the PDFs to MOBI? Depending on the type of book it works pretty well. If the PDF is published text, as opposed to scans or images, it works good. I struggled with PDFs too, fonts too small and page sizes wrong, etc. Most of what I want to carry on my kindle converts well.
Cars have had computers in them for a long time, but they don't get hacked because they're generally not connected to any networks.
If you have OnStar, you're connected to a network. A network that is indirectly connected to the Internet. And every brand is pushing their own version of OnStar. Watch some of the new car commercials, lock/unlock and start your car from your cell phone or laptop, etc. Car designers need to be thinking about firewalls, system separation, and sandboxing all code execution to enforce limitations on critical parameters.
Not only do they need to be limiting how much changes can be made to operating parameters, they need to control data leakage as well. It's bad enough that the government can track your every movement. It can be much worse for other people to have that information.
But we've been fighting the same exploits in IT for well over 2 decades (buffer overflows, sql injections), I don't expect the auto industry to do any better.
Or they decide they need to trim head count and eliminate jobs. I saw an IT department take a 20% cut in one day. One by one people were called into their manager's office and told their job had been eliminated. Then escorted to their desk to clean it out and out the door. Every one had over a decade of service with the company and worked unpaid overtime whenever it was needed to solve a production problem. I was one of them, and when I got an email a week later asking how to fix something, I told them that they determined that my skills were redundant and no longer wished to pay my salary, so they didn't need my help to fix the problem.
Since then the company has laid off most of the rest of the IT staff, they have retained only minimal operations and support staff. They have also closed most of their manufacturing plants in the US and moved production to China. So I tend to believe executive management considered ROI more important than employees. It is amusing though that as they focused on 'stockholder value' and eliminated a third of their workforce their sales have dropped 20%.
I would have made a similar statement to your before this happened. Since then I have worked for a company that would lay off developers because their skills didn't match a management change of direction. They knew perl and the business wanted to do new projects in PHP, so lay off and hire someone new with the new skillset. And another that based IT head count on some mysterious number they came up with for how much they wanted to spend, not based on the amount of work they wanted accomplished. There was always pressure to work unpaid overtime.
Seriously, with so many electro-mechanical parts, where do they get spares from?
Many of the parts are interchangeable and are still being manufactured because they weren't specific to the original manufacturer. I have a whole box full of spare parts that I got from Marco Specialties. New coils, flipper rebuild kits, ring kits, and a box of every size light bulb in all my machines.
Where things get difficult are with machine specific parts. Artwork, playfield toys and plastics, ramps, etc. I can easily find mechanical parts for my 1980 machine. My 1991 machine has plastic ramps that are outrageously expensive if you can find them. Both machines are Williams. And forget about getting a replacement playfield for my Space Invaders pinball that isn't a mylar print. (mylar changes the play characteristics of the game)
Slashdot Mirror
While I could have worded that better, I think you're missing my point.
Your point is apparently not related to what you wrote.
What if you were paying someone by a set rate to get a project done.
An example of this is you take your car down to the garage to get a tune up. The mechanic says it will be $100 and it'll be ready at the end of the day. Now if he spends the next 4 hours doing crossword puzzles, it's no concern of yours as long as your car is ready at the end of the day. You're paying a set amount ($100) to get the project done in the specified timeframe (end of the business day). Anything beyond that is not in your contract.
Possibly what you are trying to say is you hired a mechanic to put in an 8 hour shift and focus on tuning up your car. While he is dedicated to your project, you are paying for his time and not specific performance. Which means you could reallocate his time to another project if something of higher priority came up or your tune up took less time than expected. Under these circumstance that 4 hours of crossword puzzles is your concern.
Maybe that isn't the chart you intended to link, because that is NOT what it says. If that was the correct link, then you need a refresher on the difference between revenue vs spending deficits and debt. What that chart does show is revenue and spending as a percentage of GDP. From 1990 through 2001 Federal government spending as a percentage of GDP was dropping. And 1998 through 2001 revenue exceeded spending. (budget surplus)
But the agency that keeps track of our debt, the US Treasury, says we still managed to increase our debt each of those years:
1998 113,046,997,500
1999 130,077,892,718
2000 17,907,308,271
2001 133,285,202,313
It sure would be nice to have that kind of deficit now....
What if you were paying someone by a set rate to get a project done. Would you want to pay them for that 20% of the time that they would be using to do nothing towards your project?
If you are paying a set rate, then technically you aren't paying for ANYTHING beyond the delivery of your project. You aren't paying for time, you are paying for performance. It doesn't matter if they spend 10 hours a week or 100 hours a week on your project if they meet the deadline.
It'll only be a financial burden if lending dries up. Otherwise they'll just pass it along to their children like the generations before them. There hasn't been a reduction in national debt since Eisenhower was in office, and we were in the low billions of debt.
Note that he didn't say he was 20,000 feet from a DSLAM, he is 20,000 feet from a CO. It's quite common for Telcos to run fiber to a neighborhood and then install a DSLAM. In my old neighborhood they ran fiber to the neighborhoods in the early 90s because they were running out of copper pairs. Back when modems and fax machines were booming. To upgrade to DSL they just upgraded the cabinets/huts with DSLAMs.
OTOH, just because you are close enough doesn't mean they can provide DSL. In the mid 90's I lived in an apartment complex that had a phone cabinet on the premises. At that time I couldn't get DSL because, although I was within the length limit to the CO, they ran fiber to the complex and then copper to the apartments. Bell didn't feel that the complex would support a DSLAM, so we all went with Roadrunner.
The problem is that people who have debt piling up are under pressure to just get their degree and start working,
Why would they be under any pressure to graduate due to debt? The loans are subsidized and interest doesn't start accruing until they go into repayment. Granted, it's been a couple decades ago, but I knew people in college that were planning to go on and get a Masters simply because as long as they stayed in school they weren't accruing interest and didn't have to make payments. And they knew they had a better chance of earning the advanced degree then rather than leaving school after their Bachelor's and trying to come back once they had jobs, families, mortgages, etc.
The pressure only comes after you graduate and see what the job market has to offer.
As far as general ed, no one likes general ed.
... are re-classified as no longer needing to be prescribed, insurance companies stop covering the cost of such drugs
In most cases, but not always. If the drug is available both with a prescription and without, your insurance will pay if you have the prescription. Insulin is an excellent example. Oddly, I can buy insulin without a prescription cheaper than I can with one. I pay either way since I'm on an HRA with a $1500 deductible, so I buy without even though I have the prescription. Syringes and test strips are the same and next year I'm readjusting my FSA to take the insurance co. completely out of the equation for them.
That would be a $30 fee for each jurisdiction, not one $30 fee for every agency worldwide.
So, $30 from every local law enforcement branch.
Follow the links to the actual document. That's $30 per month from an individual agency per telephone number, and only ones requested through their web site. Otherwise it's $20 for each request. It's not like they are sending a bill to every law enforcement agency in the country every month.
AT&T requires you to 'activate' their 911 tool for $100 and then $25 a day. And TMobile just charges $100 a day. So I guess if you have lots of people you want to track, hope they are on AT&T or TMobile and get a volume discount.
No, this a cash cow for the telcos.
It's not a cash cow, but they do get reimbursed for costs. It's part of the provisions of CALEA that forces them to make information available to Law Enforcement. I would guess that their problems with this include;
they don't want 50 different sets of rules for providing each piece of data,
they want to make sure what 'location' refers to (IE. billing address, current location of your handset, last good location ping of your handset, tower that your handset has last communicated with, etc, etc),
and what are the rules for requiring a warrant.(can they give the 911 operator the location of the missing child's cell phone without one?)
And no, requiring a warrant will not reduce the number of requests, they are rarely turned down. Actually, I would be surprised if the Telcos weren't already requiring subpoenas for 99% of what is covered by this bill.
So the communities at large decide that there is a need to have restaurant inspections.
Restaurant inspections are already handled by local government. What the federal government regulates is the quality and inspections of the food supply so that beef raised in Montana for restaurants in New York meet health and quality guidelines. IE. covered by the commerce clause of the constitution. I suppose that Montana beef sold in Montana stores could be allowed to bypass the USDA, but consumers already prefer otherwise.
Particularly with food it would be a hard sell to get the general population to ask for less inspections.
I had an S-Blazer with a 2.8L gasoline engine. It was horribly underpowered...
The fuel injected 2.8l only had 125hp, the carb'd only 110hp. I had a 1st gen S10 truck with a carb'd 2.8 for years that had plenty of power, but it was also 2 wheel drive standard cab and lighter than the blazers. And I had an S15 with the 2.5 for a couple years. Even though it was only rated at 92hp, it drove about as well as the 2.8 because it was injected. And of course, the 2.5 was new and my 2.8 had 180k miles on it. Neither compares with the FI 4.3l though.
I'm looking to repower a 2nd gen 2.2l 5spd extended cab truck. They came from the factory with ~120hp. I know from driving my Jetta that it's 1.9 would not be suitable for that truck without using a rear end gear ratio that would kill highway fuel economy. And even though Wikipedia says the 1.9 has 105hp, my owners manual says 90hp. Maybe one of the newer 2.0l TDIs would work, they apparently come in 140 and 170hp. 170 is putting you in the 4.3l range. But I don't think those are mechanical diesels and I like the dependability of my 1.9l and 7.3l mechanical diesels. It's also a more difficult swap having to deal with ECUs that weren't designed to run in non VW chassis.
BTW, the results he got from the Vanagon wouldn't be suitable for me. Top end was 78 mph, and I drive on the Interstate where traffic regularly runs 75-80. I'd either have to run it at maximum output or get used to having someone 10 feet off of my back bumper all the time. I'm also less than impressed that it couldn't maintain speed on a 6% grade. The Grapevine is steep, but I wouldn't be interested in doing a mediocre repower.
There is also the Jetta TDI. Used ones aren't cheap, but they are out there. I have one in my driveway right next to my 7.3 F350. It would be nice to have more options out there, I'd like to repower an S10. The Cummins 4BT is too big, and I think the VW 1.9 is going to be too small. The 1.9 would be a really nice engine if it had a timing chain (instead of the belt) and the IP was a little cheaper to rebuild.
Fracking: The problem isn't the process itself, it's the waste water.
There is also concern with chemicals migrating through these newly created fractures into aquifers. Those chemicals may come from fracking process or they might come from the petroleum reserves.
Gas and Hydrogen: I think they are steps in the right direction. My understanding is the range on a heavy truck with LNG is 600+ miles. There's already over 100,000 busses and fleet trucks using LNG.
These are mostly large fleets working out of a centralized terminal. (Trained staff in a controlled environment refueling vehicles) If you can't roll out a North American infrastructure, you're limiting the usefulness of many of these trucks you want to convert. OTR trucking's advantage is they can take the most efficient route, directly to your door. If you limit them to specific corridors due to fuel availability, then they have no advantage over trains. And while range is a factor of fuel tank size, you need to increase that to 1500-2000 miles to be taken seriously in the OTR industry.
And while you are at it, you need to make sure the fuel cost per mile is similar or lower than diesel, all within emissions guidelines, and get a whole army of mechanics trained on these new engines. We're talking about an industry that will buy a roller (new truck with no engine) and transplant a known drive-train combination when the gov't starts monkeying with emission standards. They aren't going to make this drastic of a change over night. These aren't bleeding edge kind of people, not when fuel costs and equipment reliability is such a huge part of whether they earn any money.
The resource belongs to whoever holds the mineral rights.
Except the US Federal government owns a lot of the 'land' that oil companies are exploiting. All that oil that BP released into the Gulf, owned by US citizens. The North Shore and ANWR, owned by US citizens. Taxing is the wrong terminology though. The question that we should be asking is; are the royalty payments high enough?
If you wanted to lower gas prices in the US you would pass the Pickens Plan
IMO, just it being a 'Pickens Plan' is a good reason to give it a very close inspection. After how he wanted to use windmill leases to acquire water rights. There are also concerns about the extensive use of fracking now being done by the petroleum industry. And in the end we have just substituted one fossil fuel for another one.
to convert comercial semi's to Natural Gas
BTU per pound are pretty close to the same, but I have to wonder what effect the fuel storage will have on that equation. Are the pressure tanks for the natural gas going to offset all the fuel weight savings? What effect will this have on refueling times and safety? If the goal is moving commercial trucks off of petroleum diesel, biodiesel can be used without requiring large changes to existing engines. Biodiesel would have been a better approach than Ethanol in the big renewable push a few years back, the feedstocks are better and the process is more efficient. As far as that goes, with some modifications to the fuel delivery system, diesel engines can run pure vegetable oil. Making the fuel 'refining' process not much more complicated than smashing beans.
So if we're going to push natural gas we might as well collect and distribute hydrogen the same time.
Hydrogen has an excellent BTU:pound ratio. But many of the same storage issues that you have for hydrogen cars you have in hydrogen trucks. Hydrogen for aircraft or trains maybe? In those cases you could afford high quality storage equipment and professional handlers.
Sprint will end up with a faster network, particularly in major cities, than Verizon, and competitive coverage elsewhere.
Technically, they will have a higher capacity network. Not necessarily faster. For illustration, a single user on a 2500 tower might get 1/100th of it's capacity. So even though you're using 100% of your bandwidth, you wouldn't see a slowdown until user 101. Verizon Wireless, running down on 700 may only be able to support 20 users on a tower before their speed starts slowing down.
Note: the 100 and 20 are numbers I pulled out of my ass.
You do realize they sold many WiMax phones with the understanding that they would build out the WiMax network. They did very little WiMax expansion. Was that the plan all along or poor planning?
The expectation was that they would build out WiMax so far ahead of LTE that it would be the dominant 4G, or at least no worse than the GSM/CDMA divide. At the time they chose WiMax, LTE wasn't finished and could not have been used. Had Clearwire not dropped the ball on rolling out new markets, Clear/Sprint would be in the position that Verizon Wireless is now. And remember, Sprint wasn't responsible for expansion, Clearwire is handling their 4g network.
Was it's Sprint's fault for not being a bottomless ATM? Someone underestimated the cost of rolling out a 2.5Ghz network, and Sprint owns a significant percentage of Clearwire. Sprint should have known the cost. Lack of $$$ is letting Verizon Wireless stomp all over them in the number of markets deployed. But when it comes to capacity there is no way VW's 700Mhz spectrum will handle any where near as much traffic as Clear's 2.5Ghz. Of course, by the time we see that Clear will have LTE on their towers with, or in place of WiMax. The direction they are choosing they will be able to support both.
For Sprint, if they get their LTE rolled out on 1900 (?), they will be able to cover the same markets they do with CDMA (same towers) and use Clear for high capacity in big markets.
I'd argue that they aren't betting the business on iPhone, they are betting the business on Network Vision. The big change here is that they are no longer depending on someone else to provide their core 4G network.
Correction: She died because the driver was drunk AND the paparazzi were hounding them contributing to speed and distraction AND she wasn't wearing a seat belt
As despicable as some of the paparazzi can be, they did not contribute to the speed. They weren't endangering her safety by taking pictures, and even if they were, speeding off would not have been the correct response. Going back inside and calling the police would have been better. Her driver, pure and simple made the decisions that were responsible for the crash. If OJ proved nothing else, he proved that being chased does not put any obligation on you to drive fast.
But It's politics, there's no need to upgrade the office for the NEXT GUY.
You're making the assumption that the Whitehouse doesn't have a professional, apolitical, IT staff. The building is maintained by the GSA, the maintenance and janitorial staff isn't changed at the whim of an incoming president. The same for the kitchen staff. Why would the IT staff change from administration to administration?
That would be Slick Willie, or Bubba. It was intended to be derogatory. And if you are a little older than the average Slashdotter, you will remember "Tricky Dick" Nixon. Poor Jimmy was just "The Peanut Farmer".
Of course, there's a Wikipedia page for that.
I'll take dealing with the driver's license bureau (DMV) over Verizon Wireless or Time Warner Cable any day. Comcast wasn't rude, just incompetent.
Have you tried using Calibre to convert the PDFs to MOBI? Depending on the type of book it works pretty well. If the PDF is published text, as opposed to scans or images, it works good. I struggled with PDFs too, fonts too small and page sizes wrong, etc. Most of what I want to carry on my kindle converts well.
Cars have had computers in them for a long time, but they don't get hacked because they're generally not connected to any networks.
If you have OnStar, you're connected to a network. A network that is indirectly connected to the Internet. And every brand is pushing their own version of OnStar. Watch some of the new car commercials, lock/unlock and start your car from your cell phone or laptop, etc. Car designers need to be thinking about firewalls, system separation, and sandboxing all code execution to enforce limitations on critical parameters.
Not only do they need to be limiting how much changes can be made to operating parameters, they need to control data leakage as well. It's bad enough that the government can track your every movement. It can be much worse for other people to have that information.
But we've been fighting the same exploits in IT for well over 2 decades (buffer overflows, sql injections), I don't expect the auto industry to do any better.
Or they decide they need to trim head count and eliminate jobs. I saw an IT department take a 20% cut in one day. One by one people were called into their manager's office and told their job had been eliminated. Then escorted to their desk to clean it out and out the door. Every one had over a decade of service with the company and worked unpaid overtime whenever it was needed to solve a production problem. I was one of them, and when I got an email a week later asking how to fix something, I told them that they determined that my skills were redundant and no longer wished to pay my salary, so they didn't need my help to fix the problem.
Since then the company has laid off most of the rest of the IT staff, they have retained only minimal operations and support staff. They have also closed most of their manufacturing plants in the US and moved production to China. So I tend to believe executive management considered ROI more important than employees. It is amusing though that as they focused on 'stockholder value' and eliminated a third of their workforce their sales have dropped 20%.
I would have made a similar statement to your before this happened. Since then I have worked for a company that would lay off developers because their skills didn't match a management change of direction. They knew perl and the business wanted to do new projects in PHP, so lay off and hire someone new with the new skillset. And another that based IT head count on some mysterious number they came up with for how much they wanted to spend, not based on the amount of work they wanted accomplished. There was always pressure to work unpaid overtime.
My first question is: do they have spare parts?
Seriously, with so many electro-mechanical parts, where do they get spares from?
Many of the parts are interchangeable and are still being manufactured because they weren't specific to the original manufacturer. I have a whole box full of spare parts that I got from Marco Specialties. New coils, flipper rebuild kits, ring kits, and a box of every size light bulb in all my machines.
Where things get difficult are with machine specific parts. Artwork, playfield toys and plastics, ramps, etc. I can easily find mechanical parts for my 1980 machine. My 1991 machine has plastic ramps that are outrageously expensive if you can find them. Both machines are Williams. And forget about getting a replacement playfield for my Space Invaders pinball that isn't a mylar print. (mylar changes the play characteristics of the game)