We have standby circuits in many electronics products that needlessly waste energy, we leave our computers running all the time even if we're not around, same for light; we waste gigantic amounts of energy to produce things like tin foil, and the list goes on and on. Surely, at least in a few of those areas, we could do with less wasting?
No, I don't think we could.
To reduce the no-load power requirements of transformers, you're going to have to drastically increase the price of each unit.
I certainly don't leave my computers running all the time unless necessary, and for those that do, CPU power-saving features have trickled down to desktops now, so computers are more efficient when idle than ever before.
Tin foil takes energy to manufacture, but cleaning and reusing takes time, money, and energy too.
And if you don't think the above points are important, I suggest you consider that people working to pay for their vastly more expensive gadgets will waste lots more energy than any of those could possibly save in return. Remember, only about 1/4th of the electricity in the US is used for residential purposes. The other 3/4ths is used by companies... The company where you work to get the money to buy things. The factory that assembles the brand-new (energy efficient) products you buy. etc.
There's little sadder than watching a rabid environmentalist throw away perfectly good, working equipment. Often, spending lots of money to buy a new "green" item gets you a product that is only marginally more efficient than the old one.
If you want to actually save a non-trivial amount of energy, the solutions aren't easy or glamorous. Better home insulation will make a huge difference. Turn down your heater, so your refrigerator doesn't have to work as hard. Dry your clothes on a line. Compost all your own garbage. Get the entire world to drive mopeds to work (hopefully with 4-stroke engines). etc. Hell, in warmer climates, you'll probably save hundreds of dollars each years on air conditioning if you spend a few minutes, and $20 to duct the hot exhaust from your refrigerator, directly outdoors.
If you consider things like indoor plumbing a convenience, then yes, lots of energy is wasted on modern conveniences. If you instead consider that a necessity, then no, relatively very little energy is wasted on conveniences.
And even if you cut out all completely non-essential human activity, we'll have the same issues with power that we have now. Even when you're burning less of it, coal is still toxic, oil is still expensive, etc.
In my opinion, there is no other choice for lossless audio compression than FLAC. Since it was BSD licensed a couple years ago, it has been rapidly taking over the world.
It appears to have overtaken all other lossless formats in popularity online, in a short time.
It is the only one seeing significant adoption in multiple brand of hardware (MP3) players.
I'd say it has a brighter future than Vorbis, even though it is at a several year disadvantage.
I've found that just about every audio program I use, has silently added FLAC decoding support while nobody was looking.
With all of it's positive attributes, and support, FLAC is well on its way to becoming ubiquitous, and actually replacing WAV/AU/RIFF/AIFF/etc. files as the standard lossless storage and interchange audio format.
you're obviously of the opinion that it's the US's job to protect all us other helpless little countries.
I haven't expressed any opinion. The fact of the matter is that is what has happened since WWII, that's the majority of the job the US military has been doing, there is nobody else with the capability to do so, and doing that job has, in very large part, lead to the phenomenal, unprecedented world-wide political stability, and economic boom, that we've seen since WWII.
Almost HALF of all the tax money collected goes to the military, while a measly 5% goes to education.
And you think that's right?
That's just insanely stupid... insanely so.
Unfortunately, you're the insanely stupid one here.
First, you're looking at FEDERAL numbers. Have you ever heard of a federal school? No? That's because schools come out of state, not federal, budgets. That federal money is a tiny minority of the cash spend on public schools.
The military spending, however, all comes from the federal budget. There isn't an army of California, and army of Nevada, and army of New York, etc., that all comes directly out of the federal budget.
That federal money is less than 1/10th of the total spent on K-12 education through the country. The other > 9/10ths comes from state taxes. Suddenly, gee, now we see that K-12 educational spending is in fact HIGHER than military spending. That's without including spending on kindergarten, public universities, private schools, etc., etc.
The big disagreement here, is that you're making knee-jerk mindless emotional justifications, with no basis in reality. You have never looked-up real numbers, and have no idea of the realities of the subject.
The facts of the matter are: educational spending has increased 100% in the past two and a half decades, while there's only been an increase of 33% more students in that same period of time. And at the same time, all measures have shown that the education system is now doing a far poorer job of educating those children than it did 25 years ago.
The school system is not starved for money. Quite the opposite. The problem is not a lack of funds, and throwing substantially more money would not fix them, either. All it would do is increase the national debt further, and quickly bankrupt this country.
I'd like to see the OpenBSD guys treat all buffer overflows as potentially exploitable.
They do. I have no doubt the change was made to the appropriate CVS branches (OPENBSD_3_9/OPENBSD_4_0), as hundreds of other improvements are, all the time (long after release). It would be vastly impractical for them to release a patch and errata for every such change made, on the off chance it might be exploitable.
Cover up? The OpenBSD team believed it was only a remote DoS vulnerability until proof of concept code was provided, and re-labeled it as such immediately.
It will take a couple of months at least for certified equipment to appear.
It might take a couple months for the packaging and documentation to be updated. If you can't wait, looking at each vendor's websites for firmware updates and attached notes should quickly tell you which currently available gear is going to be 100% compatible, and full-speed with (future) certified 802.11n gear.
The alternator is constantly being turned by the drive belt. So whether you're using the electricity it can generate or not, you're still consuming the fuel to spin it.
That's completely and totally wrong.
When you're not drawing any electricity from the alternator, it's giving almost no resistance to the engine turning it. However, as you draw power from it, the force it takes to turn the alternator goes up accordingly.
There is no other way it could possibly work. If it was resisting the engine all the time, but not outputting any electricity, it would have to get red hot when you weren't using your headlights. It can't send unused electricity out into space.
What else did you mean other than 'wean people off it slowly'?
I meant the economy would crash only if all the establish useless crap companies went out of business all at once, now that they all do exist. However, any economy can do just fine without any useless crap being sold.
but in the end, if you just cut defence spending drastically, and put that money into education, then you'd have more educated people
Except that's completely wrong.
Education (K-12) is already being given ungodly amounts of money, and turning out complete idiots. K-12 is in horrible shape, and desperately needs to be fixed, but throwing more money at the problem is the stupidest thing you could possibly do to. I'm generally impressed with the university system, and could support money going there, but it should probably come out of the completely wasted K-12 money.
And military spending is very important. First, the US military is the police force of the world. Since the fall of the USSR, there is no other country with a blue water navy. Cut US military spending, and piracy on the high seas will return in full force in no time, and international trade will breakdown.
And that's just one aspect of it. The overwhelming force of the US military, and its dedication to stop military aggression, has been the vast majority of the reason the post-WWII world has been so peaceful. If the US military cuts its spending on advanced projects, that leaves the world open for some other country to gain significant technological advantage, and potential military parity.
Additionally, military spending is much like NASA spending (which is so highly regarded around here)... Much of that money goes into R&D of advanced technologies. The money not only directly goes back into our economy, but the R&D pushes new technology forward, and makes new wealth, feeding the economy.
In military spending, there is no doubt there is plenty of money being wasted. However, most complaints of vast wastefulness are completely off-base, and I don't believe they're much worse than any other government agency.
Useless crap is an inevitable side-effect of capitalism.
I think not. It's quite culture specific.
In any cases, even if you're correct, I was pointing out that "useless crap" isn't the underpinning of capitalism. A modern economy can be incredibly strong, even if there is 0 useless crap being sold.
"The basis of capitalism is [...] not people buying crap they don't need. It's only now [...] that the economy would collapse if it stopped all at once."
Your reading comprehension skills are absolutely horrific. I wouldn't expect a 10 year-old to have any problems with that paragraph.
Why don't you come back when you know for sure it's cheaper? I bet it's not.
My PATA doesn't support hotplugging.
If you have the right software, any PATA chipset can handle hot swapping. If not, ATA controllers that do are cheap. USB/Firewire converters are quite cheap. etc.
Besides, you absolutely do not need hot-swapping. It's an added convenience which, as I've said, is only significant if you're working with them constantly.
If you look online, prices for SATA drives just about exactly match prices for similar PATA drives
SATA drives are about $5-10 more expensive. If they're the same, it's just because they're making lots of profit on a certain drive, so they can hide the extra cost easily.
so why wouldn't I use them,
For a list, see my last comment.
Feel free to use them. The question is what the advantages/disadvantages are for notebooks. You're completely changing the subject.
Don't US broadcasters send both SD and HD signals?
Right now, a lot of content is SD, and only select (popular) shows are HD.
However, that will undoubtedly change in the near future. And even if it didn't, you can't give people a set-top-box and just tell them they won't be able to watch the most popular shows. HD support is absolutely mandatory.
DVB Tuner Boxes in the Australian Market are now available in the sub AU$50 price point. Theres little reason why they couldnt be at a similar price in the US.
Actually, there's one big reason they couldn't be a similar price in the US... HDTV. Your dirt-cheap DVB box only decodes DVD-resolution digital broadcast. When you have much more bandwidth, and 6X the resolution, you need far beefier chips.
By 2009, though, they should be coming reasonably close to that price point.
If noone bought things they didn't need, we'd eliminate all jobs but agriculture and medicine with a 90+% unemplyment rate.
Not even remotely true.
Agriculture and medicine need somebody to create the tools and facilities they use. Those doing the manufacturing, construction, janitorial services, etc., will buy goods and services that they need to keep doing their jobs.
The circle continues forever. The basis of capitalism is making products that are necessary or otherwise vastly helpful, not people buying crap they don't need. It's only now, when so many companies have sprung-up to supply useless crap, that the economy would collapse if it stopped all at once. If we wean people off of it slowly, however, it would lead to a much stronger economy.
You can still use the old rabbit ear antennas with an ATSC DTV decoder box.
No, you can't.
Rabbit ears aren't directional, and 8VSB (the modulation used for ATSC DTV) doesn't handle multipath interference very well. This will vary from receiver to receiver, with the more expensive ones doing better than the $40 ones no doubt.
Rabbit ears are also only good for reception at VHF frequencies, while part of the ATSC switchover is to move digital stations into the UHF range. For that, there are loop antennas, bow-tie antennas, etc. but NOT rabbit ears.
Additionally, the switch to the higher frequencies are going to change the prorogation of the broadcast signals, meaning far fewer areas are going to have a signal strong enough at the ground level to work with a set-top antenna. Those in the center of larger metropolitan areas should be okay for at least a few channels, but even those just slightly further out, who were happy with their rabbit ears, will suddenly find they can't get anything, and strictly need a roof-top antenna.
Personally, I'm looking forward to it. If it's at all possible to get all the major channels here with a roof-top antenna, I'll be happy to invest a couple hundred dollars, and drop my cable subscription. Daily Show, History Channel, and National Geographic are the only things I'll miss, and certainly not enough for $60 a month, or ridiculously high per-show costs on iTunes. I'll probably just rent the occasional DVD through Netflix.
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No, I don't think we could.
To reduce the no-load power requirements of transformers, you're going to have to drastically increase the price of each unit.
I certainly don't leave my computers running all the time unless necessary, and for those that do, CPU power-saving features have trickled down to desktops now, so computers are more efficient when idle than ever before.
Tin foil takes energy to manufacture, but cleaning and reusing takes time, money, and energy too.
And if you don't think the above points are important, I suggest you consider that people working to pay for their vastly more expensive gadgets will waste lots more energy than any of those could possibly save in return. Remember, only about 1/4th of the electricity in the US is used for residential purposes. The other 3/4ths is used by companies... The company where you work to get the money to buy things. The factory that assembles the brand-new (energy efficient) products you buy. etc.
There's little sadder than watching a rabid environmentalist throw away perfectly good, working equipment. Often, spending lots of money to buy a new "green" item gets you a product that is only marginally more efficient than the old one.
If you want to actually save a non-trivial amount of energy, the solutions aren't easy or glamorous. Better home insulation will make a huge difference. Turn down your heater, so your refrigerator doesn't have to work as hard. Dry your clothes on a line. Compost all your own garbage. Get the entire world to drive mopeds to work (hopefully with 4-stroke engines). etc. Hell, in warmer climates, you'll probably save hundreds of dollars each years on air conditioning if you spend a few minutes, and $20 to duct the hot exhaust from your refrigerator, directly outdoors.
If you consider things like indoor plumbing a convenience, then yes, lots of energy is wasted on modern conveniences. If you instead consider that a necessity, then no, relatively very little energy is wasted on conveniences.
And even if you cut out all completely non-essential human activity, we'll have the same issues with power that we have now. Even when you're burning less of it, coal is still toxic, oil is still expensive, etc.
But it somehow mixes well with huge hydro-electric dams, and coal/oil/natural-gas fired power plants?
I'd be far more worried about a dam in my backyard than I would about a nuclear power plant. Just ask China...
In my opinion, there is no other choice for lossless audio compression than FLAC. Since it was BSD licensed a couple years ago, it has been rapidly taking over the world.
It appears to have overtaken all other lossless formats in popularity online, in a short time.
It is the only one seeing significant adoption in multiple brand of hardware (MP3) players.
I'd say it has a brighter future than Vorbis, even though it is at a several year disadvantage.
I've found that just about every audio program I use, has silently added FLAC decoding support while nobody was looking.
With all of it's positive attributes, and support, FLAC is well on its way to becoming ubiquitous, and actually replacing WAV/AU/RIFF/AIFF/etc. files as the standard lossless storage and interchange audio format.
I'm sorry, but I'm confused...
How big is a "golf" exactly?
Is it about the size of a "jog"?
I haven't expressed any opinion. The fact of the matter is that is what has happened since WWII, that's the majority of the job the US military has been doing, there is nobody else with the capability to do so, and doing that job has, in very large part, lead to the phenomenal, unprecedented world-wide political stability, and economic boom, that we've seen since WWII.
Unfortunately, you're the insanely stupid one here.
First, you're looking at FEDERAL numbers. Have you ever heard of a federal school? No? That's because schools come out of state, not federal, budgets. That federal money is a tiny minority of the cash spend on public schools.
The military spending, however, all comes from the federal budget. There isn't an army of California, and army of Nevada, and army of New York, etc., that all comes directly out of the federal budget.
That federal money is less than 1/10th of the total spent on K-12 education through the country. The other > 9/10ths comes from state taxes. Suddenly, gee, now we see that K-12 educational spending is in fact HIGHER than military spending. That's without including spending on kindergarten, public universities, private schools, etc., etc.
The big disagreement here, is that you're making knee-jerk mindless emotional justifications, with no basis in reality. You have never looked-up real numbers, and have no idea of the realities of the subject.
The facts of the matter are: educational spending has increased 100% in the past two and a half decades, while there's only been an increase of 33% more students in that same period of time. And at the same time, all measures have shown that the education system is now doing a far poorer job of educating those children than it did 25 years ago.
The school system is not starved for money. Quite the opposite. The problem is not a lack of funds, and throwing substantially more money would not fix them, either. All it would do is increase the national debt further, and quickly bankrupt this country.
"Nowadays?" How long has it been since you've tried OpenBSD?
IPv6 has been enabled by default since v2.7 (June 2000), and fully supported by just about every included network program.
They do. I have no doubt the change was made to the appropriate CVS branches (OPENBSD_3_9/OPENBSD_4_0), as hundreds of other improvements are, all the time (long after release). It would be vastly impractical for them to release a patch and errata for every such change made, on the off chance it might be exploitable.
Cover up? The OpenBSD team believed it was only a remote DoS vulnerability until proof of concept code was provided, and re-labeled it as such immediately.
What part seems suspicious to you?
It might take a couple months for the packaging and documentation to be updated. If you can't wait, looking at each vendor's websites for firmware updates and attached notes should quickly tell you which currently available gear is going to be 100% compatible, and full-speed with (future) certified 802.11n gear.
That's completely and totally wrong.
When you're not drawing any electricity from the alternator, it's giving almost no resistance to the engine turning it. However, as you draw power from it, the force it takes to turn the alternator goes up accordingly.
There is no other way it could possibly work. If it was resisting the engine all the time, but not outputting any electricity, it would have to get red hot when you weren't using your headlights. It can't send unused electricity out into space.
I meant the economy would crash only if all the establish useless crap companies went out of business all at once, now that they all do exist. However, any economy can do just fine without any useless crap being sold.
Except that's completely wrong.
Education (K-12) is already being given ungodly amounts of money, and turning out complete idiots. K-12 is in horrible shape, and desperately needs to be fixed, but throwing more money at the problem is the stupidest thing you could possibly do to. I'm generally impressed with the university system, and could support money going there, but it should probably come out of the completely wasted K-12 money.
And military spending is very important. First, the US military is the police force of the world. Since the fall of the USSR, there is no other country with a blue water navy. Cut US military spending, and piracy on the high seas will return in full force in no time, and international trade will breakdown.
And that's just one aspect of it. The overwhelming force of the US military, and its dedication to stop military aggression, has been the vast majority of the reason the post-WWII world has been so peaceful. If the US military cuts its spending on advanced projects, that leaves the world open for some other country to gain significant technological advantage, and potential military parity.
Additionally, military spending is much like NASA spending (which is so highly regarded around here)... Much of that money goes into R&D of advanced technologies. The money not only directly goes back into our economy, but the R&D pushes new technology forward, and makes new wealth, feeding the economy.
In military spending, there is no doubt there is plenty of money being wasted. However, most complaints of vast wastefulness are completely off-base, and I don't believe they're much worse than any other government agency.
I think not. It's quite culture specific.
In any cases, even if you're correct, I was pointing out that "useless crap" isn't the underpinning of capitalism. A modern economy can be incredibly strong, even if there is 0 useless crap being sold.
The parts I omitted are on comma boundaries. Understanding how commas (or parenthesis) work is first-year English.
The excerpt doesn't change the meaning of those two sentences, from the original, in the slightest.*
(*There's a set of commas again, be careful.)
"The basis of capitalism is [...] not people buying crap they don't need. It's only now [...] that the economy would collapse if it stopped all at once."
Your reading comprehension skills are absolutely horrific. I wouldn't expect a 10 year-old to have any problems with that paragraph.
Absolutely not. The only SD signal was the analog station, and that's being shut off. It would be quite a waste to have both.
No, I certainly didn't.
What isn't true? I see nothing in your post that contradicts anything I wrote.
Why don't you come back when you know for sure it's cheaper? I bet it's not.
If you have the right software, any PATA chipset can handle hot swapping. If not, ATA controllers that do are cheap. USB/Firewire converters are quite cheap. etc.
Besides, you absolutely do not need hot-swapping. It's an added convenience which, as I've said, is only significant if you're working with them constantly.
SATA drives are about $5-10 more expensive. If they're the same, it's just because they're making lots of profit on a certain drive, so they can hide the extra cost easily.
For a list, see my last comment.
Feel free to use them. The question is what the advantages/disadvantages are for notebooks. You're completely changing the subject.
Of course, that could be 100% wrong. So your point is moot.
Additionally, the economy of ancient Egypt isn't anything like any modern economy, so it's hardly relevant.
I'm not.
What could possibly have made you think anyone was suggesting outlawing frivolous purchases?
Right now, a lot of content is SD, and only select (popular) shows are HD.
However, that will undoubtedly change in the near future. And even if it didn't, you can't give people a set-top-box and just tell them they won't be able to watch the most popular shows. HD support is absolutely mandatory.
Actually, there's one big reason they couldn't be a similar price in the US... HDTV. Your dirt-cheap DVB box only decodes DVD-resolution digital broadcast. When you have much more bandwidth, and 6X the resolution, you need far beefier chips.
By 2009, though, they should be coming reasonably close to that price point.
Not even remotely true.
Agriculture and medicine need somebody to create the tools and facilities they use. Those doing the manufacturing, construction, janitorial services, etc., will buy goods and services that they need to keep doing their jobs.
The circle continues forever. The basis of capitalism is making products that are necessary or otherwise vastly helpful, not people buying crap they don't need. It's only now, when so many companies have sprung-up to supply useless crap, that the economy would collapse if it stopped all at once. If we wean people off of it slowly, however, it would lead to a much stronger economy.
Yeah, we never had any social problems until after WWII, and the uptake of TVs, did we?
No, you can't.
Rabbit ears aren't directional, and 8VSB (the modulation used for ATSC DTV) doesn't handle multipath interference very well. This will vary from receiver to receiver, with the more expensive ones doing better than the $40 ones no doubt.
Rabbit ears are also only good for reception at VHF frequencies, while part of the ATSC switchover is to move digital stations into the UHF range. For that, there are loop antennas, bow-tie antennas, etc. but NOT rabbit ears.
Additionally, the switch to the higher frequencies are going to change the prorogation of the broadcast signals, meaning far fewer areas are going to have a signal strong enough at the ground level to work with a set-top antenna. Those in the center of larger metropolitan areas should be okay for at least a few channels, but even those just slightly further out, who were happy with their rabbit ears, will suddenly find they can't get anything, and strictly need a roof-top antenna.
Personally, I'm looking forward to it. If it's at all possible to get all the major channels here with a roof-top antenna, I'll be happy to invest a couple hundred dollars, and drop my cable subscription. Daily Show, History Channel, and National Geographic are the only things I'll miss, and certainly not enough for $60 a month, or ridiculously high per-show costs on iTunes. I'll probably just rent the occasional DVD through Netflix.