There is one dam in the north of the grand canyon, IIRC, but there were plans to build at least 2 more, which were stopped because of the Sierra Club many years ago. We could be getting a LOT more energy there.
Niagra falls, from that fact that it's still flowing, indicates it hasn't been dammed up yet. There have been more modest hydro-electric plants, but nowhere near the scale I'm talking about.
i say revive nuclear, and bow low before the mighty country of brazil for showing the rest of the world the way to a more secure, less polluted, and cheaper world of biofuels
Brazil just happens to have a special ecosystem, which makes this so easily possible for them. Not only do they have sugar cane, but also gigantic rivers they draw much of their power from. Perhaps if we dam up Niagra falls, and The Grand Canyon, we could use a lot less coal and oil too.
You might as well say we should bow before Iceland, because they happen to be lucky enough to have vast geothermal vents, from which to draw all the energy they could need.
increased food and biofuel production will place higher demand upon irrigation and water resources.
Well then, it's a good thing water is a renewable resource, isn't it?
The only thing in danger is CHEAP water, really. Desalination can ramp-up to whatever volume you want, and most countries are located near an effectively unlimited source from which to draw saline...
So because the dolphin isn't brainless enough to jump out of its tank and beach itself and die in the process, that makes them stupid?
In this case, I'd say the dolphins and goldfish have one-up on you...
He was CLEARLY talking about jumping out of a tank, into a larger body of water. He specifically mentioned jumping-out of fishing nets, and the like. You know, things that would make sense.
I don't agree with his conclusions, though. It could be that Dolphins recognize they won't get fed if they leave, or have some other understanding, which goldfish do not. You'd really have to look at cases of abused and starved dolphins, to be sure.
Also, the fact that dolphins may not reason like us in a few specific cases, does not imply they can't be intelligent in other ways. Who knows, maybe their sensory system does not allow them to recognize that there is water nearby, and they do think they will be beached.
19+ inch CRT's are a bitch to move no matter how you slice it.
I have no problems moving 19+ inch CRTs. You can easily put your arms around it and grab it at the bottom. It takes almost no upper-body strength at all once you've got a hold of it, only a bit more work for your legs. Much easier than something like a mattress, which isn't square, shifts all of it's weight around as you move it, etc.
If you want some real work, try moving a washer up a flight of stairs (eg. out of a basement).
DLP, LCD projection and CRT (projection or direct) aren't really competing for the same niche because they aren't thin panels.
DLP is being used in flat-panels like LCD and Plasma. Sony was selling 60+" DLP flat-panels (about a year ago, IIRC).
And I would have to say that they are competing, for the most part. Projection units are much cheaper, much higher resolution, and thin enough to be considered in most places where flat-screens might be desired. Flat screens will always have a certain niche, but that niche is much smaller than it otherwise would be, if not for projection units.
CRT also has the 4:3 burn-in issue.
Direct-view CRTs haven't had burn-in issues for decades.
As for projection CRT; better units won't have that problem at all, because they use larger CRTs for the same ammount of brightness.
And even for cheaper CRT projection units, burn-in isn't really common, unless someone fails to get the unit cleaned every few years, and they turn up the brightness to extremes to compensate for the dust build-up dimming the screen.
720p and 1080i at the same frame rate are about the same amount of information / s.
Completely baseless.
With the right processing, you can interpolate the 1080i to 1080p nicely, I think.
If it is a film source, you can reverse the telecining, and get a fully progressive ~24fps signal.
Actually interlaced (30fps/60Hz) material, however, takes a lot of processing to deinterlace decently. Even with PERFECT deinterlacing, you'll only get a fraction the resolution of, and none of the smooth motion of, 1080i being displayed natively on a 1080i interlaced display.
Regular DVDs are encoded as interlaced, and one laptops they are re-integrated
That's just completely wrong. Almost all films encoded to (NTSC) DVDs are done so progressively at 23.976fps. It includes telecine flags in the headers to tell the DVD player to play it at 29.97fps interlaced (NTSC TV rate) and output duplicate fields where needed in a 3:2 pattern, so everything looks even.
So, for most DVDs, software DVD players just ignore the telecine flags, and output the progressive video as it is encoded on the DVD.
Even in PAL countries, the DVDs are encoded fully progressive, although they are speed-up to 25fps to match PAL TVs, and the DVD player interlaces it on playback for output to standard TVs.
All PC (CRT and LCD) and laptop screens are progressive, and take interlaced videos and un-interlace them.
Most CRTs can handle interlaced video modes, although use of that feature is rare.
That's why I'm rooting for Blueray, as it's the only standard that support 1080p.
Both standards support 1080p, Toshiba just decided to make their first players output 1080i to make them less expensive, and because few HDTVs can display 1080p anyhow.
There doesn't need to be any weird 3-2 pulldown to get a progressive image (film) into an interlaced screen,
You need to have 3:2 pulldown to get progressive video onto an interlaced screen, no matter what. It's only when you have a progressive display, and a non-progressive signal (hard telecined, actually), that you need to have a chip with the smarts to reverse the 3:2 pulldown pattern and output the original progressive picture.
1080i is interlaced, and interlacing (why we still use it is beyond me) reduces the observed resolution by about 30%, so 720p is roughly the same as 1080i.
That number was completely made-up. You can't summarized interlaced vs progressive down into a simple number, no matter what that number is.
Interlaced 1080 video will look just as good as progressive 1080 video in low-motion scenes, and MUCH better than 720p.
In scenes with the fastest of fast motion, interlaced video may look like it's as little as half the resolution of progressive video, but it will look far smoother than 1080p, as if it is double the frame-rate.
That trade-off is why interlaced video is used. People want high resolution, but they want smooth motion as well. 1080p gives one, while 720p gives the other, and 1080i gives part of both. 720p, even counting the doubled frame-rate, only gives 88% as many pixels (per-second) as 1080. That, of course, doesn't address the temporal/spacial aliasing caused by interlacing.
Plus, I suspect it's mainly an issue that 1080i is the highest resolution the large majority of HDTVs can support.
(only Blu-ray does 1080p I believe, HD-DVD only does 1080i)
The formats support either, it's just that for the first players, Sony went for the high-end, and Toshiba went for the low-end.
Being a scrawny nerd with no muscle tone makes moving CRT's a problem. It's primary reason I dumped my nice 19 inch CRT monitor for an LCD.
You know, I can at least understand the argument when someone is talking about a 36" flat-screen, but a 19"?? Come on. They probably don't even weigh 50 lbs.
And personally, I'd still take the 36+" CRT. It's a (small) struggle moving it up and down flights of stairs, but how often do you need to do it? I don't make a habit of carrying my TVs around with me. My last 20" TV survived for about 10 years, and needed to be moved exactly once in that period of time.
And how do you people handle things other than TVs? They don't make many sofas that weigh less than CRT TVs. Not to mention that sofas aren't nice and square, don't come with built-in handles, and like to shift their weight around while they are being moved.
Although you are certainly being a complete "dink", you COULD have had a point, if you had put a little more thought into it.
What bothers me is the fact that HIV/AIDS research is getting an inordinately large ammount of funding (both public and private). Other diseases, which kill many more people, are getting much less funding than HIV/AIDS research.
And, yes, AIDS is 99.99+% preventable over all, and 98% preventable, even if you continue to be extremely promiscuous (but use a condom). Yet many other diseases, which kill more people, are NOT preventable at all, or at least not in any reasonable way.
Even a disease like lung cancer has a much higher than 2% chance (IIRC) of infecting an individual who has never smoked in their life. That, despite the fact that lung cancer gets inordinately less funding than other diseases, because it is looked upon as taboo, and a preventable disease.
Why AIDS has such incredibly special status, has long been a mystery to me.
Hmmm, the large majority of your examples were non-Microsoft hardware problems... odd, that.
English language 101 for LaughingCoder.
All paragraphs that happen to be in close approximation to each other, do NOT have to ALL be about the same subject. You do NOT have to compose two seperate posts, to write about two seperate subjects. You can change the subject with a transition or segway sentence. For example:
With that said, I have seen some frustrating hardware problems.
There, now isn't that better? Surely, now, the next time you see a post which changes subjects, you won't go trolling again, complaining that half their post didn't have anything to do with the intro sentence.
it's not really a problem - the download is happening in the background
Yes, I said as much in my post. The problem is that IE shows complete nonsense as the current average speed, which NO OTHER BROWSERS DO, even though they download in the background as well.
For every case you can list, where draft technologies became 100% compatible... I can list 10 where there were numerous problems... A few of them in very recent cases, with pre-standard 802.11 equipment.
Manufacturers aren't waiting... They've been rolling it out for quite a while now, and will surely continue to do so, standard or no.
Delaying the standard for more than a year is only going to ensure that none of these systems will be interoperable, and certainly not forewards compatible.
An imperfect (slightly less backwards-compatible) standard now, would be much better than a perfect standard in 2 years.
This gives them a strong incentive to do things cost-effectively.
Historically, the problem with this has been safety...
If it isn't explicitly specified as a requirement, they won't build any level of safety into it at all.
Even if safety standards are set, they'll completely bullshit their way to whatever benchmark they are supposed to meet, by modifying tests, tweaking anything they possibly can, and ignoring every imporant flaw they can possibly get away with.
802.11 a/g would not be sufficient for broadcasting hundreds of channels unless you have really bad image quality and some fucking awesome compression.
500Kbps is perfectly adequate for a TV stream.
With 802.11g MIMO APs, you see quoted speeds up to 240Mbps. Try a little math on those numbers, and tell me again how many channels it can handle simultaneously... Then consider it would also be trivially easy to include and simultaneously use both 802.11g and 802.11a trancievers on each commercial jet.
I'm not even going to bother addressing the rest of your troll...
Cellphones don't work when you're over the middle of an ocean.
That is certainly a fixable problem. Planes are high altitude, meaning they have line-of-sight to a much larger area than at ground-level. So you'd need a small number of buoys in the ocean, and no need for a tower...
Plus, I suspect it's easier to use a satellite connection for live TV, than to try and and pipe it over a cellphone network.
I suspect the opposite. With a satellite, you need your dish to be lined up VERY accurately, even as the plane travels forward, banks, climbs, etc. With cell service, you just need a small omidirectional antenna on the belly.
I don't know how much cell phone companies would charge for the needed bandwidth, but something like 802.11a/g would be adequate for multicasting hundreds of various standard-definition TV channels, at very low cost.
Besides, if you're flying over multiple countries, you need to get on several different cellphone networks, which means having to sign contracts with multiple providers if you wanna connect the entire plane,
As opposed to satellites, where one will work across the entire planet, right?
and in some regions, networks might be incapable of handling anything besides voice traffic.
I take it you've never heard of a modem?
Besides, if they were looking at getting big bucks from airlines, they'd have the money and motivation needed to get their infrastructure upgraded in those poorer countries.
Another interesting point is that you'd have far less lag to/from a ground-based tower, rather than a satellite, making internet access more practical.
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There is one dam in the north of the grand canyon, IIRC, but there were plans to build at least 2 more, which were stopped because of the Sierra Club many years ago. We could be getting a LOT more energy there.
Niagra falls, from that fact that it's still flowing, indicates it hasn't been dammed up yet. There have been more modest hydro-electric plants, but nowhere near the scale I'm talking about.
My car is a bit too small for a fission plant, let alone the lake of water also needed.
What do you drive, again?
But still nowhere near the density and flexibility of liquid fuels, which is the main reason we don't already have electric cars.
Nobody burns biofuels for "most urban requirements". They're entirely in the realm of cars, trucks, generators, etc.
Oil is useful for portable energy applications, otherwise you'd have to be an idiot to use it (or to even suggest it).
Tidal would be an obvious choice for desalination plants. Wind, Solar, Nuclear, etc., would be equally well suited for the job.
I doubt that you actually exist, and are not just a figment of my imagination...
The facts don't happen to care about your doubts.
Brazil just happens to have a special ecosystem, which makes this so easily possible for them. Not only do they have sugar cane, but also gigantic rivers they draw much of their power from. Perhaps if we dam up Niagra falls, and The Grand Canyon, we could use a lot less coal and oil too.
You might as well say we should bow before Iceland, because they happen to be lucky enough to have vast geothermal vents, from which to draw all the energy they could need.
Well then, it's a good thing water is a renewable resource, isn't it?
The only thing in danger is CHEAP water, really. Desalination can ramp-up to whatever volume you want, and most countries are located near an effectively unlimited source from which to draw saline...
In this case, I'd say the dolphins and goldfish have one-up on you...
He was CLEARLY talking about jumping out of a tank, into a larger body of water. He specifically mentioned jumping-out of fishing nets, and the like. You know, things that would make sense.
I don't agree with his conclusions, though. It could be that Dolphins recognize they won't get fed if they leave, or have some other understanding, which goldfish do not. You'd really have to look at cases of abused and starved dolphins, to be sure.
Also, the fact that dolphins may not reason like us in a few specific cases, does not imply they can't be intelligent in other ways. Who knows, maybe their sensory system does not allow them to recognize that there is water nearby, and they do think they will be beached.
I have no problems moving 19+ inch CRTs. You can easily put your arms around it and grab it at the bottom. It takes almost no upper-body strength at all once you've got a hold of it, only a bit more work for your legs. Much easier than something like a mattress, which isn't square, shifts all of it's weight around as you move it, etc.
If you want some real work, try moving a washer up a flight of stairs (eg. out of a basement).
If they can do it in a tiny package, very inexpensively, fanless, and all with a fraction the power of a notebook computer, I say more power to them.
DLP is being used in flat-panels like LCD and Plasma. Sony was selling 60+" DLP flat-panels (about a year ago, IIRC).
And I would have to say that they are competing, for the most part. Projection units are much cheaper, much higher resolution, and thin enough to be considered in most places where flat-screens might be desired. Flat screens will always have a certain niche, but that niche is much smaller than it otherwise would be, if not for projection units.
Direct-view CRTs haven't had burn-in issues for decades.
As for projection CRT; better units won't have that problem at all, because they use larger CRTs for the same ammount of brightness.
And even for cheaper CRT projection units, burn-in isn't really common, unless someone fails to get the unit cleaned every few years, and they turn up the brightness to extremes to compensate for the dust build-up dimming the screen.
Completely baseless.
If it is a film source, you can reverse the telecining, and get a fully progressive ~24fps signal.
Actually interlaced (30fps/60Hz) material, however, takes a lot of processing to deinterlace decently. Even with PERFECT deinterlacing, you'll only get a fraction the resolution of, and none of the smooth motion of, 1080i being displayed natively on a 1080i interlaced display.
That's just completely wrong. Almost all films encoded to (NTSC) DVDs are done so progressively at 23.976fps. It includes telecine flags in the headers to tell the DVD player to play it at 29.97fps interlaced (NTSC TV rate) and output duplicate fields where needed in a 3:2 pattern, so everything looks even.
So, for most DVDs, software DVD players just ignore the telecine flags, and output the progressive video as it is encoded on the DVD.
Even in PAL countries, the DVDs are encoded fully progressive, although they are speed-up to 25fps to match PAL TVs, and the DVD player interlaces it on playback for output to standard TVs.
Most CRTs can handle interlaced video modes, although use of that feature is rare.
Both standards support 1080p, Toshiba just decided to make their first players output 1080i to make them less expensive, and because few HDTVs can display 1080p anyhow.
You need to have 3:2 pulldown to get progressive video onto an interlaced screen, no matter what. It's only when you have a progressive display, and a non-progressive signal (hard telecined, actually), that you need to have a chip with the smarts to reverse the 3:2 pulldown pattern and output the original progressive picture.
That number was completely made-up. You can't summarized interlaced vs progressive down into a simple number, no matter what that number is.
Interlaced 1080 video will look just as good as progressive 1080 video in low-motion scenes, and MUCH better than 720p.
In scenes with the fastest of fast motion, interlaced video may look like it's as little as half the resolution of progressive video, but it will look far smoother than 1080p, as if it is double the frame-rate.
That trade-off is why interlaced video is used. People want high resolution, but they want smooth motion as well. 1080p gives one, while 720p gives the other, and 1080i gives part of both. 720p, even counting the doubled frame-rate, only gives 88% as many pixels (per-second) as 1080. That, of course, doesn't address the temporal/spacial aliasing caused by interlacing.
Plus, I suspect it's mainly an issue that 1080i is the highest resolution the large majority of HDTVs can support.
The formats support either, it's just that for the first players, Sony went for the high-end, and Toshiba went for the low-end.
You know, I can at least understand the argument when someone is talking about a 36" flat-screen, but a 19"?? Come on. They probably don't even weigh 50 lbs.
And personally, I'd still take the 36+" CRT. It's a (small) struggle moving it up and down flights of stairs, but how often do you need to do it? I don't make a habit of carrying my TVs around with me. My last 20" TV survived for about 10 years, and needed to be moved exactly once in that period of time.
And how do you people handle things other than TVs? They don't make many sofas that weigh less than CRT TVs. Not to mention that sofas aren't nice and square, don't come with built-in handles, and like to shift their weight around while they are being moved.
Although you are certainly being a complete "dink", you COULD have had a point, if you had put a little more thought into it.
What bothers me is the fact that HIV/AIDS research is getting an inordinately large ammount of funding (both public and private). Other diseases, which kill many more people, are getting much less funding than HIV/AIDS research.
And, yes, AIDS is 99.99+% preventable over all, and 98% preventable, even if you continue to be extremely promiscuous (but use a condom). Yet many other diseases, which kill more people, are NOT preventable at all, or at least not in any reasonable way.
Even a disease like lung cancer has a much higher than 2% chance (IIRC) of infecting an individual who has never smoked in their life. That, despite the fact that lung cancer gets inordinately less funding than other diseases, because it is looked upon as taboo, and a preventable disease.
Why AIDS has such incredibly special status, has long been a mystery to me.
Psst... only 99 of them died. The other two just wouldn't stop being so irritating...
Still no vaccine for getting run-over by a 2 ton car.
English language 101 for LaughingCoder.
All paragraphs that happen to be in close approximation to each other, do NOT have to ALL be about the same subject. You do NOT have to compose two seperate posts, to write about two seperate subjects. You can change the subject with a transition or segway sentence. For example:
With that said, I have seen some frustrating hardware problems.
There, now isn't that better? Surely, now, the next time you see a post which changes subjects, you won't go trolling again, complaining that half their post didn't have anything to do with the intro sentence.
Yes, I said as much in my post. The problem is that IE shows complete nonsense as the current average speed, which NO OTHER BROWSERS DO, even though they download in the background as well.
And I hate idiots, morons, and trolls.
For every case you can list, where draft technologies became 100% compatible... I can list 10 where there were numerous problems... A few of them in very recent cases, with pre-standard 802.11 equipment.
Manufacturers aren't waiting... They've been rolling it out for quite a while now, and will surely continue to do so, standard or no.
Delaying the standard for more than a year is only going to ensure that none of these systems will be interoperable, and certainly not forewards compatible.
An imperfect (slightly less backwards-compatible) standard now, would be much better than a perfect standard in 2 years.
Historically, the problem with this has been safety...
If it isn't explicitly specified as a requirement, they won't build any level of safety into it at all.
Even if safety standards are set, they'll completely bullshit their way to whatever benchmark they are supposed to meet, by modifying tests, tweaking anything they possibly can, and ignoring every imporant flaw they can possibly get away with.
I wish my boss was a deer... Just a little peanut butter, and he'd always be happy.
500Kbps is perfectly adequate for a TV stream.
With 802.11g MIMO APs, you see quoted speeds up to 240Mbps. Try a little math on those numbers, and tell me again how many channels it can handle simultaneously... Then consider it would also be trivially easy to include and simultaneously use both 802.11g and 802.11a trancievers on each commercial jet.
I'm not even going to bother addressing the rest of your troll...
That is certainly a fixable problem. Planes are high altitude, meaning they have line-of-sight to a much larger area than at ground-level. So you'd need a small number of buoys in the ocean, and no need for a tower...
I suspect the opposite. With a satellite, you need your dish to be lined up VERY accurately, even as the plane travels forward, banks, climbs, etc. With cell service, you just need a small omidirectional antenna on the belly.
I don't know how much cell phone companies would charge for the needed bandwidth, but something like 802.11a/g would be adequate for multicasting hundreds of various standard-definition TV channels, at very low cost.
As opposed to satellites, where one will work across the entire planet, right?
I take it you've never heard of a modem?
Besides, if they were looking at getting big bucks from airlines, they'd have the money and motivation needed to get their infrastructure upgraded in those poorer countries.
Another interesting point is that you'd have far less lag to/from a ground-based tower, rather than a satellite, making internet access more practical.
Yes, because infrared is REAL hard to jam...
You might need... a piece of paper.
It's a JETTA... Why didn't you just pick the little thing up, and toss it around a little?