You can go to Walmart and buy a DVD player for $30. That DVD player has to do a lot of the same things. It has to decode a MPEG2 signal, and convert it to analog out. It has a case, power supply, and a remote control.
DVD Players have to decode an 8Mbit 720x480 MPEG-2 signal. ATSC converter boxes have to decode a 19Mbit 1920x1080 MPEG-2 signal.
A 300MHz Pentium2 can decode DVD video. A 2000GHz Pentium4 will struggle to decode highdef ATSC video.
Your $30 DVD player doesn't have RF-out. A separate composite to RF converter will cost you $15.
so I'm going to say that the DVD player is actually more complex. And it costs $30.
It's very easy to be sure of something when you're completely ignorant of the subject.
I'm sure we'll see Ferraris going for $2,000 any time now, since they're less complex than a used Ford Taurus.
A comet is crashing towards the area you live in. Scientists have a raging debate as to whether or not it will completely disintegrate before hitting your house. Do you stay in your house till they reach a "consensus" or get the hell out of there?
Obviously leaving is the safe route.
However, it's the opposite situation where climate is concerned. The commonly touted "cures" are VERY expensive, have serious economic consequences, etc.
Aggressively switching away from current fuel sources is extremely expensive, and potentially crippling to the economy. Your comet scenario has no equivalent dilemma. Perhaps if you are A) Completely Broke and B) Have a good paying job in the city, you'd start to have a similar choice to make. Is the unknown risk of the chances of your family being killed worth the more immediate risk of your family being malnourished, lacking proper medical care, etc.?
We still need to take precautions to prevent pollution and switch to cleaner energy sources.
If you don't count CO2 emissions, natural gas is an EXTREMELY CLEAN energy source. The same is true for propane, and several other fossil fuels.
Expending MORE ENERGY to clean the output of fossil fuel power sources (ie. coal) is a viable solution to the pollution problem, but it will result in increased amounts of CO2.
So it's not remotely as brain-dead straightforward of a choice as you make it out to be. Gosh, we didn't solve all the world's problems with a post on/.
Plants use solar, but very few natural things use wind or tidal power. Nature has had a very long time to try and fill these energy niches, so it is a safe guess that they can't produce enough energy to sustain a large population at a reasonable standard of living.
Plants have severe constraints. Just because a plant can't swing it, doesn't mean it's not possible. eg. Wind is pretty mild at ground level, so you'd be hard pressed to find the energy to grow to get up to steady winds.
Furthermore, it's likely that there isn't much evolutionary drive to use other sources directly, since solar is simply so abundant.
And finally, both plants and animals make EXTENSIVE use of wind and tides, it just isn't the sole source of energy.
Perhaps seaweed would make a good example... It uses tides as the sole method to propagate, but since solar energy is rather abundant on the open water, there's not much drive NOT to use solar as the main energy source.
Alternatively, we can build houses, houses, and more houses on the land and make gobs of money. See Las Vegas for details,
There is SOME of that going on, on a small scale. However, it only makes up 10% of the entire landmass of the state of Nevada. Cover just 25% of the state in solar reflectors, and you'll have more electrical generation capacity than the entire WORLD needs.
Of course that's the extreme case. More realistic is something like 5% in Nevada, and simply displacing all coal production, while leaving all the current non-coal power plants running. ie.: hydro, nuclear wind, etc.
I do know that I find it kinda suspicious that they're all about $10-20 more than the Government coupon amount.
When the coupon program started, they were all 2-3X that amount. It's actually impressive how far the prices have fallen in the past ~2 years.
And if it was possible, you can bet companies would happily sell converter boxes for $40 rather than the 50-60 they go for right now... That's simple competition.
An even if they sold for under $40, you still pay the tax on the amount, so at the very least, a $35 converter box would be immensely profitable, but companies just can't swing it with the current cost of the technologies required.
The 4 chips used can be bought wholesale in quantities of 100 for about $2 per set.
1) I don't believe that for a second. 2) The cost of a device isn't just the sale price of couple of it's components, any more than that computer you're using is sold for the same price as the raw materials that went into it.
The complexity is really no different than a cheap $10 video card or a cheap wireless card.
Of course it is. A $10 video card doesn't do MPEG-2 decoding, RF out, RF in, etc. Combine a mid-range video card, a wireless card, and then you're just starting to get some idea of the complexity involved.
. I don't see a $40 price difference between TVs with both NTSC and ATSC tuners and ones that a few years ago only handled NTSC.
Of course not. There's a bit of a price savings if it's built-into the TV, like not requiring RF out, separate remote control, casing, power supply, etc. So the cost of an integrated ATSC decoder is only about $25, instead of the $50 of a converter box.
I recently saw an article that stated the $49 Colby was selling for $19 (US equivalent) in mainland China.
Evidence of nothing. The Chinese government does a lot of subsidizing of domestic products, and sometimes it's best to sell off excess products below cost rather than warehousing them and losing money.
Reception tests is rural areas have been dismal. A large portion of folks are too far away to get decent reception,
Completely baseless.
While there are always cases where reception will be worse with any kind of a switch in technology, there have been vastly MORE cases where the opposite has been true, and people get much BETTER reception, and more channels, with digital. Of course, those people don't complain at the top of their lungs at ever opportunity, so they don't get counted.
Multipath is still a big problem with DTV.
In fact it has not been a problem in a very long time. Manufacturers quickly found out how to oversample the signal, and get a much better lock, far less subject to doppler shift and multipath than it was more than a decade ago, back when your complaints were real, and not just your wishful thinking.
For the record I can't get PBS now and most of the semi-education stuff you referenced. DTV won't change that.
It must be so nice to be psychic.
Since you've never tried, you'd have no way of knowing whether you can receive PBS stations with a digital converter box or not. Certainly, there are several stations I can't receive on analog that I get a strong signal from with digital.
In fact, USB has several issues : it is 5V while almost nothing works with 5V right now, which implies a conversion everywhere.
What the hell...
5V is PRECISELY what just about every small device needs and uses. A pair of AA batteries is 3V. A small Li-Ion battery is typically 3.6V, etc. 5V is EXACTLY what you need to be able to power a ~3V device while still having power left over to charge the battery. I have innumerable wall-warts that are 4.5V, 6V, etc. 5V makes a perfect replacement for almost all small devices I own.
Second, these mass-produced crappy converter boxes should not cost $40. They're all made in China and would normally retail for around $9 each.
How could anybody in their right mind believe such patent nonsense?
The digital converter boxes have to be low noise to tune and capture 6MHz of bandwidth, demodulate the 8VSB coding, perform lots of the error detection and correction, demux the channels and indvidual audio/video/text streams, then decode the 19Mbps (1920x1080@30i resolution) MPEG-2 video stream, downscale to 720x480, and output to Composite and RF outputs.
It's absolutely amazing anyone has been able to make a device that could do so for $50. When is the last time you saw a DVD player for $9, let alone one that could effectively recieve a faint RF signal, and decode an extremely high bitrate, high definition video? It's an absolutely idiotic assertion.
BTW, most folks don't realize those converter boxes are not going to give you any better quality or hi-def. In fact they're more likely to give you worse reception or just none at all.
No. In absolutely every case I've seen, and the overwhelming majority of countless others I've heard of, you will get VASTLY better quality through a digital converter box than analog. I know in my area, the one unwatchably staticy analog station was replaced by a dozen crystal-clear digital stations, with just a few, quite minor drop-outs.
As I've said before, the digital stations I DO receive happen to be all the ones that will be keeping their current transmitter and channel assignment, while all the ones I'm still unable to receive are the ones that will be switching to their original VHF-high transmitters. All this delaying of the switchover is pushing by my own reception of almost half of my local channels, and making it more likely that I will have to resort to buying a more expensive antenna rather than waiting.
Personally, I don't plan to convert
Yes, we all needed to know that. Because your personal entertainment preferences have a real impact on the rest of us...
as there is nothing worth watching on the TV anyway. I do netflix, get my news online, and can't stand the soap-operaish series on TV.
Exactly. NOVA, Frontline, American Experience, Secrets of the Dead, Nature, History Detectives, 60 Minutes, etc. These are all TERRIBLE shows, that you would best be completely unable to ever watch.
You forget that to make electricity using CSP, you need a turbine and a generator. That is extra equipment
It is, but it happens to be extremely inexpensive.
goals for CSP are only to be competitive by 2020
The fact that one DoE project is slightly less ambitious than another DoE project doesn't prove ANYTHING about the potential for the underlying technologies.
It is difficult to see how solar thermal can take the cost reductions that PV can take.
Solar thermal consists, by and large, of a few pieces of shiny metal. You're NEVER going to make any (complicated) materials at a lower cost than that.
PV is still boosting conversion efficiency, reducing material use, reducing the energy input for the material it does use
Yes. It is so HORRENDOUS to begin with, that it's easy to improve. However, there is an absolute end point to possible improvements, and some solar thermal technologies have already hit 80%. A century from now, SOME PV technology just MIGHT slightly exceed that. When the fuel is free, an extra 20% efficiency is worth very, very little.
Certainly PV is already projected to be the cheapest form of future generation, we just don't know how cheap it will go.
That's a positively idiotic assertion. Of course, people have been making stupid predictions since the beginning of time.
* The private sector is starved of cash, * The recent fall in oil & gas prices has once again opened the gap between fossil generation and sustainable,
Private companies hedge against price increases in commodities all the time.
It's not at all difficult to imagine a large number of them hedging against increasing electrical rates by building solar power plants (rather than based on some form of insurance, as is currently the case).
What's more, with interest rates at all time lows, the economics are pretty good for such an investment. Once you've bought-in to the hedge, it's just a few months before you can start getting some small percentage of your electricity nearly-free (not counting the investment, which would have been paid out to a 3rd party for possibly no return).
The present market shares for solar production look to disadvantage the US.
No.
There are two kinds of solar. Photovoltaic and Thermal.
Photovoltaic is horribly expensive, and inefficient, but scales down linearly (calculators).
Solar-Thermal is dirt cheap and extremely efficient, and scales up exponentially.
PV panels are useful in small, portable devices. They're used on roofs only because of subsidies and zero maintenance. They're not the future of electrical generation. Solar-thermal is.
The two have no more in common than a wind turbine does with a coal-fired power plant turbine.
When are we to stop comparing the US with EU states?
Probably about the same time that EU states stop comparing themselves with the US...
Besides, what are we supposed to compare it to? The entire European continent?
I actually don't care if we are "behind" EU in general or "ahead" since no one apparently considers the EU a practical entity for comparison purposes.
Yes, it would be so much more fair to compare the US with a loose confederation of states with 170% the population, much more dense population, far different environment, etc.
Considering that there are no two countries anywhere that have the exact same land mass, population count, climate, natural resources, etc. I'd say no direct comparison is going to be particularly useful for anything, EVER.
Comparing Germany to the US doesn't seem any more unfair than any other arbitrary comparison.
Face any way you want, you're not getting an outside line.
Radio waves simply don't work that way.
The angle, your distance from the transmitter, propagation at a given frequency, etc., all will make for innumerable cases where all 4 can be blocked, with minimal skill, allowing outgoing communications.
And equally show-stopping, you're depending on the contraband cell phone, itself, to pick-up on, and always use the strongest signal it can find. That can actually be changed rather easily in software.
When I see resumes from Indian students, both educated in India and educated in the US (often just graduate school), the Indian students have FAR better resumes than any of the American students.
I'm willing to be that:
1) The wages you are offering are simply much too low to attract anything but entry-level Americans with no particular job experience or, yes, resume writing skills.
2) Thanks to cost of living and exchange rates, your crap wages in the US simply translate into rather high wages for mid-career level Indian workers.
protectionism never works. if there exists some sort of talent outside the borders of your country that can do what you can do for less, simple economics will gravitate to that.
H1-B visas have NOTHING to do with protectionism. They are, in their entirety, a program for US-based companies to import foreigners under a contract ensuring indentured-servitude, and wages VASTLY below fair market value.
I would be all for increased immigration, but not the Republican ideal of "worker" programs that just create a near-slavery relationship with the corporations holding all the cards. The H1-B visa program should NEVER have been created, and should be eliminated ASAP.
All calls will be routed through the prison cell site.
Prisoners have NOTHING BUT TIME. Through the slightest bit of intelligence, and sheer force of trial and error, SOMEBODY will figure out that holding a piece of aluminum foil over half the phone, while facing just the right distance, will work. And once one person figures it out, the rest will, quickly.
How often are you going to make changes, and how quickly will the prisoners adapt to them?
Why would a non-zealot go with ATI when nVidia's closed source driver is far superior?
Because the next Linux update may make your NVidia drivers fail to compile and/or work.
I had to downgrade from Slack 12.2 because the most recent version of the driver that supported my GeForce4 card wouldn't compile on the system.
Developing drivers for Linux isn't like Windows, where everyone is on the same version, at the same times. It's a moving target, and NVidia hasn't shown ANY commitment to maintain support for their hardware more than a couple years after it is sold.
You take it wrong. I lived in Wisconsin, of all places.
Road ice is usually cleared within a day or two of any storm.
I'd like to know where YOU live, that you can go through winter with all the snow and ice confined to just a few days of the year. In most places, it's a near continual process, and there's ice on the roads very nearly EVERY DAY.
It snows, the snow melts, it re-freezes into ice, and you have a fun surprise on your drive to work.
Even if it was confined to a few days, where do you work that you get to just take a day off after every storm?
I take it you've never been in a tornado zone. These storms travel in a geometric pattern called a line.
You couldn't be more wrong. I've spent plenty of time in Oklahoma, and still regularly visit relatives there. I've seen the aftermath of several tornadoes. I don't know where you get your information, but it's a complete fairy tail.
Yes, the tornado isn't very wide... but as soon as it picks up a car, destroys a house, etc., the debris it picks up goes for MILES, and does SEVERE damage to ALL the surrounding areas.
That's what you get with asteroids: Monster waves hundreds of feet high.
Yes. And the odds of that occurring are so close as to be indistinguishable from ZERO.
If you're advocating living somewhere that the death and destruction is much larger, but simply spread out so it doesn't LOOK quite as bad, just say so. So far, you couldn't have made a less compelling point that the frozen north is safe, while anywhere near the oceans is horribly dangerous.
Second, as nearly as I can tell, nothing is being done to prepare consumers for the channel reassignments that will occur along with the analog shutdown. A significant number of stations will be changing their assigned frequency for digital transmission, and quite a lot of them will be changing from UHF to VHF.
In all likelyhood, you'll get BETTER reception from a VHF station than a UHF station. The propagation is just so much better, and obstacles don't cause nearly so much signal loss.
But if you bought one of those nice, compact, inexpensive "HDTV antenna" they've been selling for several years now, that, my friends, is a UHF antenna and you'll lose any digital stations that move to VHF. Maybe not, if they're powerful enough. But I don't know how on earth you can find out before the actual moment arrives.
UHF antennas don't do a shabby job on VHF-hi. VHF-low is another story, but almost nobody, outside of Alaska, is going to get HDTV signals on VHF-low channels.
And it's TRIVIAL to find out how well your amplified "HDTV antenna" will do. Hook it up to an analog tuner (ie. your TV) and see if you can get the analog signals with the antenna.
I know my ancient, $1, loop antenna, does a GREAT job with VHF-hi. Though heavily staticy, I receive analog channels 7-13 just fine. Believe me, that's more than enough for a DTV signal lock. Meanwhile, the UHF/DTV counterparts to those analog stations don't happen to come in, with my indoor antenna, right now. So I fully expect to double my channel count when the switchover happens. Unfortunately congress is just kicking that further down the road, sticking me with a lousy channel selection (or being forced to buy a better antenna) for several more months now.
Moreover, the winter weather warning is: "stay in your house tonight". No big deal. The hurricane warning is: "Cram your family in the car, drive 200 miles in gridlock and hole up in a hotel for half a week." That sucks.
Absolutely not. You'd have to hole-up in your house for weeks, perhaps months, to avoid the HUGE risk of driving on ice. Hell, even WALKING on ice is pretty damn dangerous. The death toll from one year of winter weather alone will outstrip a decade worth of hurricanes.
even in the worst case you can walk a hundred yards or so to return to normalcy after the event.
That's completely untrue. Entire cities are often devastated by tornadoes. With wind speeds more than twice that of the strongest hurricanes, the debris spreads over a very wide area, and does severe damage for dozens of miles around.
Again, the only reason tornadoes don't kill a vastly larger number of people, and do billions of dollars in property damage, are simply because the affected areas are so sparsely populated that some don't come within a hundred miles of the nearest human, and others only cross the edge of some town, in the middle of some large swath of vacant land.
When the "big one" hits Los Angeles without warning, then you'll really witness something that wasn't a safe place to begin with.
It wasn't safe when it was sparsely populated because people built a lot of unreinforced masonry structures. It's actually a little bit safer now with more modern building codes.
It would be exceedingly safe with a rural population. An un-reinforced building, nowhere near a fault line, has little to worry about. Now that buildings and bridges are reinforced, per-capita, it may be safer, but that still means a very, very large number of deaths.
If you want proof, just look up and compare the Landers quake with the Northridge quake. Funny how the much larger quake killed essentially no-one (I refuse to count heart attacks).
Not to mention the tsunami risk they face if a even a tiny asteroid hits anywhere in the Pacific ocean or there's a large undersea landslide or earthquake in the right spot.
At an elevation of 200+ feet, it would require a hell of a tidal wave to damage anything more than the relatively small percentage of beachfront areas.
All of these things potentially dwarf the murder rate you seem to be hinting at.
I wasn't referring to murder at all. Try mudslides, forest fires, extensive flooding due to urban runoff, earthquakes as mentioned above, etc.
Traffic accidents should also be considered, as inclement weather (fog, ice, whatever) are only minimally dangerous until combined with high-speed vehicles. But being unable to see the road won't likely kill anyone, unless there is traffic
You say that Active Directory isn't easy unless your time is worthless because of tasks that come later, but Linux doesn't even get to the starting blocks easily.
You're right, Linux doesn't make it easy to get started with a minimally working server. However, Windows makes it almost IMPOSSIBLE to go much beyond that minimally working configuration. Meanwhile, once you've spent a little time figuring out how to configure the service in Linux (or most any other Unix) you can make ANY changes you want. And furthermore, the service will work, you won't run into weird bugs every day. And your configuration will stick, the server won't silently change some arbitrary important setting for no reason, which Windows servers are fond of doing.
It's the typical stitch in time. Do you want to spend a bit more time (or money, assuming a company) up front to get a better system working? Or do you want something that you can get started quickly, and waste much, much more time (or money) keeping it working, and figuring out how to do something other than the defaults?
Sure there are. They're just not generally close enough to the trendy seashores for most people's tastes.
Point to them. I'll be happy to tell you why you're so utterly wrong.
I don't believe there's enough safe area on earth for 1/10th the current population. And guess what? Areas that are very "safe" when sparsely populated, become extremely dangerous when developed into densely packed cities. Witness: Los Angeles.
For all the hysteria about the hurricane season on the coasts that kill a dozen people each year, the hundreds that die in the north from freezing cold, snow and ice storms go almost completely unreported, unless the newscasters feel like laughing at the "funny" video of cars sliding over the roads. And in the non-coastal areas of the south have tornadoes to contend with. Of course that's US-centric, but all geographical areas have their trade-offs, and natural disasters, that you just have to hope don't occur in your particular area, within your lifetime.
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DVD Players have to decode an 8Mbit 720x480 MPEG-2 signal.
ATSC converter boxes have to decode a 19Mbit 1920x1080 MPEG-2 signal.
A 300MHz Pentium2 can decode DVD video.
A 2000GHz Pentium4 will struggle to decode highdef ATSC video.
Your $30 DVD player doesn't have RF-out. A separate composite to RF converter will cost you $15.
It's very easy to be sure of something when you're completely ignorant of the subject.
I'm sure we'll see Ferraris going for $2,000 any time now, since they're less complex than a used Ford Taurus.
Obviously leaving is the safe route.
However, it's the opposite situation where climate is concerned. The commonly touted "cures" are VERY expensive, have serious economic consequences, etc.
Aggressively switching away from current fuel sources is extremely expensive, and potentially crippling to the economy. Your comet scenario has no equivalent dilemma. Perhaps if you are A) Completely Broke and B) Have a good paying job in the city, you'd start to have a similar choice to make. Is the unknown risk of the chances of your family being killed worth the more immediate risk of your family being malnourished, lacking proper medical care, etc.?
If you don't count CO2 emissions, natural gas is an EXTREMELY CLEAN energy source. The same is true for propane, and several other fossil fuels.
Expending MORE ENERGY to clean the output of fossil fuel power sources (ie. coal) is a viable solution to the pollution problem, but it will result in increased amounts of CO2.
So it's not remotely as brain-dead straightforward of a choice as you make it out to be. Gosh, we didn't solve all the world's problems with a post on /.
Plants have severe constraints. Just because a plant can't swing it, doesn't mean it's not possible. eg. Wind is pretty mild at ground level, so you'd be hard pressed to find the energy to grow to get up to steady winds.
Furthermore, it's likely that there isn't much evolutionary drive to use other sources directly, since solar is simply so abundant.
And finally, both plants and animals make EXTENSIVE use of wind and tides, it just isn't the sole source of energy.
Perhaps seaweed would make a good example... It uses tides as the sole method to propagate, but since solar energy is rather abundant on the open water, there's not much drive NOT to use solar as the main energy source.
There is SOME of that going on, on a small scale. However, it only makes up 10% of the entire landmass of the state of Nevada. Cover just 25% of the state in solar reflectors, and you'll have more electrical generation capacity than the entire WORLD needs.
Of course that's the extreme case. More realistic is something like 5% in Nevada, and simply displacing all coal production, while leaving all the current non-coal power plants running. ie.: hydro, nuclear wind, etc.
When the coupon program started, they were all 2-3X that amount. It's actually impressive how far the prices have fallen in the past ~2 years.
And if it was possible, you can bet companies would happily sell converter boxes for $40 rather than the 50-60 they go for right now... That's simple competition.
An even if they sold for under $40, you still pay the tax on the amount, so at the very least, a $35 converter box would be immensely profitable, but companies just can't swing it with the current cost of the technologies required.
1) I don't believe that for a second.
2) The cost of a device isn't just the sale price of couple of it's components, any more than that computer you're using is sold for the same price as the raw materials that went into it.
Of course it is. A $10 video card doesn't do MPEG-2 decoding, RF out, RF in, etc. Combine a mid-range video card, a wireless card, and then you're just starting to get some idea of the complexity involved.
Of course not. There's a bit of a price savings if it's built-into the TV, like not requiring RF out, separate remote control, casing, power supply, etc. So the cost of an integrated ATSC decoder is only about $25, instead of the $50 of a converter box.
Evidence of nothing. The Chinese government does a lot of subsidizing of domestic products, and sometimes it's best to sell off excess products below cost rather than warehousing them and losing money.
Completely baseless.
While there are always cases where reception will be worse with any kind of a switch in technology, there have been vastly MORE cases where the opposite has been true, and people get much BETTER reception, and more channels, with digital. Of course, those people don't complain at the top of their lungs at ever opportunity, so they don't get counted.
In fact it has not been a problem in a very long time. Manufacturers quickly found out how to oversample the signal, and get a much better lock, far less subject to doppler shift and multipath than it was more than a decade ago, back when your complaints were real, and not just your wishful thinking.
It must be so nice to be psychic.
Since you've never tried, you'd have no way of knowing whether you can receive PBS stations with a digital converter box or not. Certainly, there are several stations I can't receive on analog that I get a strong signal from with digital.
What the hell...
5V is PRECISELY what just about every small device needs and uses. A pair of AA batteries is 3V. A small Li-Ion battery is typically 3.6V, etc. 5V is EXACTLY what you need to be able to power a ~3V device while still having power left over to charge the battery. I have innumerable wall-warts that are 4.5V, 6V, etc. 5V makes a perfect replacement for almost all small devices I own.
How could anybody in their right mind believe such patent nonsense?
The digital converter boxes have to be low noise to tune and capture 6MHz of bandwidth, demodulate the 8VSB coding, perform lots of the error detection and correction, demux the channels and indvidual audio/video/text streams, then decode the 19Mbps (1920x1080@30i resolution) MPEG-2 video stream, downscale to 720x480, and output to Composite and RF outputs.
It's absolutely amazing anyone has been able to make a device that could do so for $50. When is the last time you saw a DVD player for $9, let alone one that could effectively recieve a faint RF signal, and decode an extremely high bitrate, high definition video? It's an absolutely idiotic assertion.
No. In absolutely every case I've seen, and the overwhelming majority of countless others I've heard of, you will get VASTLY better quality through a digital converter box than analog. I know in my area, the one unwatchably staticy analog station was replaced by a dozen crystal-clear digital stations, with just a few, quite minor drop-outs.
As I've said before, the digital stations I DO receive happen to be all the ones that will be keeping their current transmitter and channel assignment, while all the ones I'm still unable to receive are the ones that will be switching to their original VHF-high transmitters. All this delaying of the switchover is pushing by my own reception of almost half of my local channels, and making it more likely that I will have to resort to buying a more expensive antenna rather than waiting.
Yes, we all needed to know that. Because your personal entertainment preferences have a real impact on the rest of us...
Exactly. NOVA, Frontline, American Experience, Secrets of the Dead, Nature, History Detectives, 60 Minutes, etc. These are all TERRIBLE shows, that you would best be completely unable to ever watch.
The M in ATM also happens to stand for "Mode" and "Management".
It is, but it happens to be extremely inexpensive.
The fact that one DoE project is slightly less ambitious than another DoE project doesn't prove ANYTHING about the potential for the underlying technologies.
Solar thermal consists, by and large, of a few pieces of shiny metal. You're NEVER going to make any (complicated) materials at a lower cost than that.
Yes. It is so HORRENDOUS to begin with, that it's easy to improve. However, there is an absolute end point to possible improvements, and some solar thermal technologies have already hit 80%. A century from now, SOME PV technology just MIGHT slightly exceed that. When the fuel is free, an extra 20% efficiency is worth very, very little.
That's a positively idiotic assertion. Of course, people have been making stupid predictions since the beginning of time.
Private companies hedge against price increases in commodities all the time.
It's not at all difficult to imagine a large number of them hedging against increasing electrical rates by building solar power plants (rather than based on some form of insurance, as is currently the case).
What's more, with interest rates at all time lows, the economics are pretty good for such an investment. Once you've bought-in to the hedge, it's just a few months before you can start getting some small percentage of your electricity nearly-free (not counting the investment, which would have been paid out to a 3rd party for possibly no return).
No.
There are two kinds of solar. Photovoltaic and Thermal.
Photovoltaic is horribly expensive, and inefficient, but scales down linearly (calculators).
Solar-Thermal is dirt cheap and extremely efficient, and scales up exponentially.
PV panels are useful in small, portable devices. They're used on roofs only because of subsidies and zero maintenance. They're not the future of electrical generation. Solar-thermal is.
The two have no more in common than a wind turbine does with a coal-fired power plant turbine.
Probably about the same time that EU states stop comparing themselves with the US...
Besides, what are we supposed to compare it to? The entire European continent?
Yes, it would be so much more fair to compare the US with a loose confederation of states with 170% the population, much more dense population, far different environment, etc.
Considering that there are no two countries anywhere that have the exact same land mass, population count, climate, natural resources, etc. I'd say no direct comparison is going to be particularly useful for anything, EVER.
Comparing Germany to the US doesn't seem any more unfair than any other arbitrary comparison.
Radio waves simply don't work that way.
The angle, your distance from the transmitter, propagation at a given frequency, etc., all will make for innumerable cases where all 4 can be blocked, with minimal skill, allowing outgoing communications.
And equally show-stopping, you're depending on the contraband cell phone, itself, to pick-up on, and always use the strongest signal it can find. That can actually be changed rather easily in software.
Not only is that entirely untrue, you've also not even ATTEMPTED to prove ANY of your points.
Name calling doesn't convince anyone.
I'm willing to be that:
1) The wages you are offering are simply much too low to attract anything but entry-level Americans with no particular job experience or, yes, resume writing skills.
2) Thanks to cost of living and exchange rates, your crap wages in the US simply translate into rather high wages for mid-career level Indian workers.
H1-B visas have NOTHING to do with protectionism. They are, in their entirety, a program for US-based companies to import foreigners under a contract ensuring indentured-servitude, and wages VASTLY below fair market value.
I would be all for increased immigration, but not the Republican ideal of "worker" programs that just create a near-slavery relationship with the corporations holding all the cards. The H1-B visa program should NEVER have been created, and should be eliminated ASAP.
Prisoners have NOTHING BUT TIME. Through the slightest bit of intelligence, and sheer force of trial and error, SOMEBODY will figure out that holding a piece of aluminum foil over half the phone, while facing just the right distance, will work. And once one person figures it out, the rest will, quickly.
How often are you going to make changes, and how quickly will the prisoners adapt to them?
Because the next Linux update may make your NVidia drivers fail to compile and/or work.
I had to downgrade from Slack 12.2 because the most recent version of the driver that supported my GeForce4 card wouldn't compile on the system.
Developing drivers for Linux isn't like Windows, where everyone is on the same version, at the same times. It's a moving target, and NVidia hasn't shown ANY commitment to maintain support for their hardware more than a couple years after it is sold.
You take it wrong. I lived in Wisconsin, of all places.
I'd like to know where YOU live, that you can go through winter with all the snow and ice confined to just a few days of the year. In most places, it's a near continual process, and there's ice on the roads very nearly EVERY DAY.
It snows, the snow melts, it re-freezes into ice, and you have a fun surprise on your drive to work.
Even if it was confined to a few days, where do you work that you get to just take a day off after every storm?
You couldn't be more wrong. I've spent plenty of time in Oklahoma, and still regularly visit relatives there. I've seen the aftermath of several tornadoes. I don't know where you get your information, but it's a complete fairy tail.
Yes, the tornado isn't very wide... but as soon as it picks up a car, destroys a house, etc., the debris it picks up goes for MILES, and does SEVERE damage to ALL the surrounding areas.
Yes. And the odds of that occurring are so close as to be indistinguishable from ZERO.
If you're advocating living somewhere that the death and destruction is much larger, but simply spread out so it doesn't LOOK quite as bad, just say so. So far, you couldn't have made a less compelling point that the frozen north is safe, while anywhere near the oceans is horribly dangerous.
In all likelyhood, you'll get BETTER reception from a VHF station than a UHF station. The propagation is just so much better, and obstacles don't cause nearly so much signal loss.
UHF antennas don't do a shabby job on VHF-hi. VHF-low is another story, but almost nobody, outside of Alaska, is going to get HDTV signals on VHF-low channels.
And it's TRIVIAL to find out how well your amplified "HDTV antenna" will do. Hook it up to an analog tuner (ie. your TV) and see if you can get the analog signals with the antenna.
I know my ancient, $1, loop antenna, does a GREAT job with VHF-hi. Though heavily staticy, I receive analog channels 7-13 just fine. Believe me, that's more than enough for a DTV signal lock. Meanwhile, the UHF/DTV counterparts to those analog stations don't happen to come in, with my indoor antenna, right now. So I fully expect to double my channel count when the switchover happens. Unfortunately congress is just kicking that further down the road, sticking me with a lousy channel selection (or being forced to buy a better antenna) for several more months now.
Absolutely not. You'd have to hole-up in your house for weeks, perhaps months, to avoid the HUGE risk of driving on ice. Hell, even WALKING on ice is pretty damn dangerous. The death toll from one year of winter weather alone will outstrip a decade worth of hurricanes.
That's completely untrue. Entire cities are often devastated by tornadoes. With wind speeds more than twice that of the strongest hurricanes, the debris spreads over a very wide area, and does severe damage for dozens of miles around.
Again, the only reason tornadoes don't kill a vastly larger number of people, and do billions of dollars in property damage, are simply because the affected areas are so sparsely populated that some don't come within a hundred miles of the nearest human, and others only cross the edge of some town, in the middle of some large swath of vacant land.
It would be exceedingly safe with a rural population. An un-reinforced building, nowhere near a fault line, has little to worry about. Now that buildings and bridges are reinforced, per-capita, it may be safer, but that still means a very, very large number of deaths.
If you want proof, just look up and compare the Landers quake with the Northridge quake. Funny how the much larger quake killed essentially no-one (I refuse to count heart attacks).
At an elevation of 200+ feet, it would require a hell of a tidal wave to damage anything more than the relatively small percentage of beachfront areas.
I wasn't referring to murder at all. Try mudslides, forest fires, extensive flooding due to urban runoff, earthquakes as mentioned above, etc.
Traffic accidents should also be considered, as inclement weather (fog, ice, whatever) are only minimally dangerous until combined with high-speed vehicles. But being unable to see the road won't likely kill anyone, unless there is traffic
You're right, Linux doesn't make it easy to get started with a minimally working server. However, Windows makes it almost IMPOSSIBLE to go much beyond that minimally working configuration. Meanwhile, once you've spent a little time figuring out how to configure the service in Linux (or most any other Unix) you can make ANY changes you want. And furthermore, the service will work, you won't run into weird bugs every day. And your configuration will stick, the server won't silently change some arbitrary important setting for no reason, which Windows servers are fond of doing.
It's the typical stitch in time. Do you want to spend a bit more time (or money, assuming a company) up front to get a better system working? Or do you want something that you can get started quickly, and waste much, much more time (or money) keeping it working, and figuring out how to do something other than the defaults?
Point to them. I'll be happy to tell you why you're so utterly wrong.
I don't believe there's enough safe area on earth for 1/10th the current population. And guess what? Areas that are very "safe" when sparsely populated, become extremely dangerous when developed into densely packed cities. Witness: Los Angeles.
For all the hysteria about the hurricane season on the coasts that kill a dozen people each year, the hundreds that die in the north from freezing cold, snow and ice storms go almost completely unreported, unless the newscasters feel like laughing at the "funny" video of cars sliding over the roads. And in the non-coastal areas of the south have tornadoes to contend with. Of course that's US-centric, but all geographical areas have their trade-offs, and natural disasters, that you just have to hope don't occur in your particular area, within your lifetime.