On the average, the underground temprature at ten feet below ground level is something like 52 degrees.
Maybe in Canada...
The depth you need is around 30 feet to get to a stable tempurature (not 10), and you need to spend energy circulating the antifreeze through the very long loop of heat-exchanging pipes (which you need for enough surface area). And the tempurature down there is around 68F degrees, not quite enough for this.
Meanwhile, if you were to just buy and install a ground-source heatpump unit for heating and cooling your home, your heating and cooling bills would fall to almost nothing.
Self-checkout should be _strictly_ reserved for people who have about 5 things _max_.
Yeah, self-checkout lanes are a necessity for people only buying a few items. They couldn't possibly have come up with SOME OTHER WAY of QUICKLY letting people with "5 items or less" get checked out quickly...
Next time I go into the grocery store, I'll ask the lady that's walking around, helping people use the "self checkout" machines, if she's got any ideas how they could accomplish this, without having to buy 4 massively expensive machines, requiring continual maintenance...
he's pulling in 48K a year, working 34-36 hours a week. [...] I would say that the Union to which he belongs plays a significant role in what he makes.
"Nice lil store ya got here. It'd be a shame if somethin' were ta happen ta it."
I wouldn't be worried about night-time or cloudy-day stuff. Electrical use is highest when the sun is beatin'est.
So, you're spending all this money on setting up a power generator, which is really only useful a tiny percent of the time (summer, peak power usage hours). In the winter, you'd probably be better served by using those water-heating panels to heat your home (and water) directly.
I think I'll put my money in the bank, and use the earned interest to pay (more than) the difference of my electric and gas bills.
Well, this new development solves the difficult part of the equation--it provides a low-cost way to capture that heat.
Umm, no. Cheap heatengines have been around for a very long time.
This water is brought in through underground pipes and is significantly cooler than the ambient temperature in the summer.
Cooler? Yes, at least for a few hours of the day. Significantly cooler? No!
Besides, water is ANYTHING but free. If it was, we'd just blast water from the hose into a small turbine, and generate electricity from that.
You're dangerously close to describing perpetual motion machines.
The very fact that almost all large-scale solar power plants aren't price-competitive with non-renewables should tell you there is something wrong here. If this was so great, they would buy up 20 square miles of desert and put it to work, powering the grid.
Home windmills and solar panels are only around because people:
A) Accept a loss (compared to bank-rates) on their money, to help "save the planet". B) Have remote homes that are off-grid. C) Pay extra for more reliability than the power grid provides.
Flat lenses/filters/holograms (for maximising the use of P.V. cells) is the only home power generation technology which even sounds like it really has promise, without having to resort to crackpot physics.
Because right now the only thing I hear from people building or buying new computers about the power requirements is "make sure you get a PFC PSU and get lots of watts", not "make sure you get a low-power GPU".
No, you'll never hear "low-power GPU". You will, however, heard "fanless videocard" ALL THE TIME, and it's effectively a code for the same idea.
Regular people understand the issues far more than geeks give them credit for.
I don't see how ownership of the original media serves as "proof" that he didn't download it.
It's not "proof", but it's certainly a nice bit of evidence to support his claim.
Besides, you don't seem to realize that DOWNLOADING FROM A P2P NETWORK ISN'T ILLEGAL ON IT'S OWN... If he OWNED the movie already, and decided to download a BACKUP copy of it, HE HASN'T DONE ANYTHING ILLEGAL AT ALL.
you upload chunks of the torrent even as you download the file.
Good... Then let the MPAA just TRY to PROVE that someone who was DOWNLOADING it from him, was doing so illegally. Good luck with that.
What if he purchased the DVD after viewing the downloaded torrent?
Well then that would be a completely different situation. You, however, are just speculating, with no evidence at all to back-up this senario. I doubt the MPAA is any better.
Yes, yes... I didn't argue with the "procurement" part of the post, only the "inconsistent" argument, which simply isn't true.
And as for the latter, I expect you'll still come off cheaper with several different companies for AMD products, than for dealing with only Intel on more expensive items.
Then why does one say "AMD Processor Pricing Effective May 23, 2006" and the other say "AMD Processor Pricing Effective July 24, 2006", and neither of them have the same prices on them?
Because AMD has apparently been making changes to their website, and that document has been changed several times since the link was first posted...
It is now correct, but when I posted that comment, they were exactly the same document.
Any group action that tries to make any sort of societal change is likely to be labelled as terrorism.
My tinfoil-hat is off to you, sir. I'm not REMOTELY paranoid enough to even IMAGINE that someone might believe that complaining about a store would get you the testicle-shock treatment.
I plan to move into a tiny shack in the middle of nowhere, in hopes I can one day attain this level of insane paranoia...
I never understood why people in America feel they have to make someone else's life shittier just to express some point. How about you write a letter, and you get all your friends to write letters, talking about how displeased you are with the service you received.
Companies care about $$$, and NOTHING ELSE. If you write a letter, they'll give you the brush-off form response. If you make a big scene, make more work for employees, and yes, make their jobs more miserable, you'll single-handedly cost the company SIGNIFICANT ammounts of money. One strategy is effective, the other is not.
Of course, I suppose with your level of paranoia, you would believe that the civil rights movement was successful because of the letter-writing campaign, and not the boycotts, sit-ins, protests, and other things which MAKE SOMEONE ELSE'S LIFE SHITTIER JUST TO EXPRESS SOME POINT.
So even assuming that my time is only worth $6/hr...the 10 minutes it would have taken me to run my FULL cart through a self checkout instead of standing behind that loon would have been $3 worth of time. I make considerably more than $6/hr, so realistically it would have been more than $3.
The disconnect here is that you're not realizing the slow checkout is an ARTIFICAL LIMITATION, created by that store to begin with.
Just ask yourself how many extra extra cashiers they could afford to have working, if they didn't spend that money on the automatic checkout machines in the first place.
You shouldn't feel too concerned about it, unless you're doing lots of driving at night. It's not that you were a zombie the whole time, it's just that your brain didn't have significant stimulation, and it basically wiped the memory of that period of time. It's a very weird phenomena to be sure, but not as serious as it seems at first.
CLOSE THE GOD-DAMMED SELF-CHECKOUT MACHINES, AND PUT THAT LADY BEHIND A CASH REGISTER, SOLVING BOTH PROBLEMS FOR FAR LESS MONEY. IT MAKES NO SENSE AT HOME DEPOT, OF ALL PLACES, SITTING THERE FOR 2 FULL MINUTES TELLING YOU TO PUT YOUR (FEATHER-WEIGHT OR GIGANTIC AND MASSIVE) ITEM IN THE BAG ON THE SENSOR, BEFORE LETTING YOU GET THE HELL OUT OF THERE.
Of course I may just a little bitter. It is, though, almost gratifying to see my local Home Depot's self-checkout lines entirely abandonded, while the lines at the two open (manned) cash registers go winding through the isles. Gratifying to see it once or twice, that is, as the longer lines and moronic self-checkout machines make me shop at Lowes, now, where they have no self-checkout machines, few cashiers (more than two, of course) and yet practically never any waiting lines.
No, that's not "before and after", that's "before and before".
That's the exact same document, with the exact same date (July 24, 2006), just linked to from different sections of AMD's site, so the URL isn't exactly the same.
it's running on less than $150.oo in parts. Old Celeron 1.8 and horribly old ATX/AGP motherboard bought together from newegg for less than $50.00.
Gee, why am I not amazed that cheap computer hardware is adequate for playing back century-old low-resolution television, using decades-old ineffecient lossy video codecs?
Switch to HDTV, though, and you need a top-of-the-line CPU and fairly new GPU just to play H.264 encoded 1080 video. Editing and re-encoding is another matter all-together, taking many hours on the fastest of machines. Not that re-encoding low-def TV is all that fast to begin with.
and 64 bit has ZERO attraction to consumers and most people as there is no benefit or erason to switch to the 64 bit processors (unless you rtun linux and are a tinkerer.)
Really? Hard drives are awful slow, so writing-out (edited) DVD-sized video is very slow and painful without 8GBs of RAM.
third-party boards for AMD chips because they tend to be inconsistent
This is nonsense. If you buy dirt-cheap motherboards from PC-Chips, ECS, etc., you're going to be lucky to get something that works, let alone something that is consistent. You can't compare that to expensive Intel-branded motherboards.
I made it a point to say "Intel-branded" because Intel is just the middle-man in this proposition. You can buy damn-near exactly the same motherboards directly from the companies that manufacture them for Intel (used-to be Asus, I haven't bothered to find who it is now).
And similarly-priced AMD boards from the same high-end companies are every bit as consistent as their Intel-branded bretheren.
If I was even remotely connected to the group that finally provides indesputable proof of cold fusion, I'd hide and keep running.
Really? I think I'd publish EVERY LAST BIT of info I had, as far and wide as possible, making it utterly useless to harm anyone over it. Patents, for one, and immediately and fully accessible to the public.
They are getting paid more. More than Indians, Chinese, and Eastern Europeans doing just the engineering work.
Utter bullshit. This is nothing bug a straw man. I was clearly refering to people getting paid MORE than they were before, not MORE than "others" who happen to be dirt cheap.
The Americans are paid for their competency, managing the ideas behind the engineering.
No, that's the whole point. They aren't getting paid any more for their newfound "competency" than they were when they were just plain old engineers.
We are compensated by shifting lower skill jobs to cheaper places. It increases productivity, lowers the cost of goods and services and increases profits that are repatriated.
Nonsense. Inflation and "cost of living" are calculated to take into account lower cost goods and the like, and all these magical benefits aren't appearing, and sure as hell aren't offseting the declining pay.
As a whole, it forces entire workforces to move to higher value jobs,
Problem is, people aren't getting paid any more for their "higher value" work than they were for their "low value" work.
It makes the middle class wealthier in both the country outsorcing and providing the outsourced service.
The problem with assertions like this is that you have to provide EVIDENCE to prove it, and you've provided none. This/. story is evidence of the OPPOSITE trend, so you've got some work to do.
To stay competitive, you have to add value beyond working to a job description. Welcome to the new millenium.
Yes, but people aren't getting paid any more for their added efforts. That was the whole promise of The WTO, NAFTA, etc. It's supposed to be more "effecient" to outsource jobs, meaning higher incomes and cheaper products all-around, not more work for less money.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe in Canada...
The depth you need is around 30 feet to get to a stable tempurature (not 10), and you need to spend energy circulating the antifreeze through the very long loop of heat-exchanging pipes (which you need for enough surface area). And the tempurature down there is around 68F degrees, not quite enough for this.
Meanwhile, if you were to just buy and install a ground-source heatpump unit for heating and cooling your home, your heating and cooling bills would fall to almost nothing.
Yeah, self-checkout lanes are a necessity for people only buying a few items. They couldn't possibly have come up with SOME OTHER WAY of QUICKLY letting people with "5 items or less" get checked out quickly...
Next time I go into the grocery store, I'll ask the lady that's walking around, helping people use the "self checkout" machines, if she's got any ideas how they could accomplish this, without having to buy 4 massively expensive machines, requiring continual maintenance...
"Nice lil store ya got here. It'd be a shame if somethin' were ta happen ta it."
So, you're spending all this money on setting up a power generator, which is really only useful a tiny percent of the time (summer, peak power usage hours). In the winter, you'd probably be better served by using those water-heating panels to heat your home (and water) directly.
I think I'll put my money in the bank, and use the earned interest to pay (more than) the difference of my electric and gas bills.
Umm, no. Cheap heatengines have been around for a very long time.
Cooler? Yes, at least for a few hours of the day. Significantly cooler? No!
Besides, water is ANYTHING but free. If it was, we'd just blast water from the hose into a small turbine, and generate electricity from that.
You're dangerously close to describing perpetual motion machines.
The very fact that almost all large-scale solar power plants aren't price-competitive with non-renewables should tell you there is something wrong here. If this was so great, they would buy up 20 square miles of desert and put it to work, powering the grid.
Home windmills and solar panels are only around because people:
A) Accept a loss (compared to bank-rates) on their money, to help "save the planet".
B) Have remote homes that are off-grid.
C) Pay extra for more reliability than the power grid provides.
Flat lenses/filters/holograms (for maximising the use of P.V. cells) is the only home power generation technology which even sounds like it really has promise, without having to resort to crackpot physics.
This is just some VC money-grab.
No, you'll never hear "low-power GPU". You will, however, heard "fanless videocard" ALL THE TIME, and it's effectively a code for the same idea.
Regular people understand the issues far more than geeks give them credit for.
It's not "proof", but it's certainly a nice bit of evidence to support his claim.
Besides, you don't seem to realize that DOWNLOADING FROM A P2P NETWORK ISN'T ILLEGAL ON IT'S OWN... If he OWNED the movie already, and decided to download a BACKUP copy of it, HE HASN'T DONE ANYTHING ILLEGAL AT ALL.
Good... Then let the MPAA just TRY to PROVE that someone who was DOWNLOADING it from him, was doing so illegally. Good luck with that.
Well then that would be a completely different situation. You, however, are just speculating, with no evidence at all to back-up this senario. I doubt the MPAA is any better.
Yes, yes... I didn't argue with the "procurement" part of the post, only the "inconsistent" argument, which simply isn't true.
And as for the latter, I expect you'll still come off cheaper with several different companies for AMD products, than for dealing with only Intel on more expensive items.
Because AMD has apparently been making changes to their website, and that document has been changed several times since the link was first posted...
It is now correct, but when I posted that comment, they were exactly the same document.
Never dealt with an iffy touch-screen?
My tinfoil-hat is off to you, sir. I'm not REMOTELY paranoid enough to even IMAGINE that someone might believe that complaining about a store would get you the testicle-shock treatment.
I plan to move into a tiny shack in the middle of nowhere, in hopes I can one day attain this level of insane paranoia...
Companies care about $$$, and NOTHING ELSE. If you write a letter, they'll give you the brush-off form response. If you make a big scene, make more work for employees, and yes, make their jobs more miserable, you'll single-handedly cost the company SIGNIFICANT ammounts of money. One strategy is effective, the other is not.
Of course, I suppose with your level of paranoia, you would believe that the civil rights movement was successful because of the letter-writing campaign, and not the boycotts, sit-ins, protests, and other things which MAKE SOMEONE ELSE'S LIFE SHITTIER JUST TO EXPRESS SOME POINT.
The disconnect here is that you're not realizing the slow checkout is an ARTIFICAL LIMITATION, created by that store to begin with.
Just ask yourself how many extra extra cashiers they could afford to have working, if they didn't spend that money on the automatic checkout machines in the first place.
You shouldn't feel too concerned about it, unless you're doing lots of driving at night. It's not that you were a zombie the whole time, it's just that your brain didn't have significant stimulation, and it basically wiped the memory of that period of time. It's a very weird phenomena to be sure, but not as serious as it seems at first.
New, high-tech checkout methods are new, unkown, foreign (in the non-literal sense), etc.
Here's an idea...
CLOSE THE GOD-DAMMED SELF-CHECKOUT MACHINES, AND PUT THAT LADY BEHIND A CASH REGISTER, SOLVING BOTH PROBLEMS FOR FAR LESS MONEY. IT MAKES NO SENSE AT HOME DEPOT, OF ALL PLACES, SITTING THERE FOR 2 FULL MINUTES TELLING YOU TO PUT YOUR (FEATHER-WEIGHT OR GIGANTIC AND MASSIVE) ITEM IN THE BAG ON THE SENSOR, BEFORE LETTING YOU GET THE HELL OUT OF THERE.
Of course I may just a little bitter. It is, though, almost gratifying to see my local Home Depot's self-checkout lines entirely abandonded, while the lines at the two open (manned) cash registers go winding through the isles. Gratifying to see it once or twice, that is, as the longer lines and moronic self-checkout machines make me shop at Lowes, now, where they have no self-checkout machines, few cashiers (more than two, of course) and yet practically never any waiting lines.
I have no time to look at impulse items... I'm too busy slamming my fist against the screen, trying to get the dammed thing to work.
And I'm still waiting to recieve my paycheck for my part-time job as a bag-boy and cashier...
It's not a xenophobic thing. It's a "Those fucking things never work right" thing.
No, that's not "before and after", that's "before and before".
That's the exact same document, with the exact same date (July 24, 2006), just linked to from different sections of AMD's site, so the URL isn't exactly the same.
Gee, why am I not amazed that cheap computer hardware is adequate for playing back century-old low-resolution television, using decades-old ineffecient lossy video codecs?
Switch to HDTV, though, and you need a top-of-the-line CPU and fairly new GPU just to play H.264 encoded 1080 video. Editing and re-encoding is another matter all-together, taking many hours on the fastest of machines. Not that re-encoding low-def TV is all that fast to begin with.
Really? Hard drives are awful slow, so writing-out (edited) DVD-sized video is very slow and painful without 8GBs of RAM.
This is nonsense. If you buy dirt-cheap motherboards from PC-Chips, ECS, etc., you're going to be lucky to get something that works, let alone something that is consistent. You can't compare that to expensive Intel-branded motherboards.
I made it a point to say "Intel-branded" because Intel is just the middle-man in this proposition. You can buy damn-near exactly the same motherboards directly from the companies that manufacture them for Intel (used-to be Asus, I haven't bothered to find who it is now).
And similarly-priced AMD boards from the same high-end companies are every bit as consistent as their Intel-branded bretheren.
Of course. Snakes causing evolution fits fairly well into the Adam, Eve, serpent/Devil, and apple parable.
"Evidence" is NOT "proof" and vise versa.
You can arrest someone on very little, very flaky evidence. That's what a trial is for.
That's not "guilt" in any sense of the word, that's "suspicion".
Your whole insane rant is based entirely on a mistaken understanding of vocabulary...
Al Capone was arrested for tax evasion, not threatening witnesses.
Martha Stewart also got to go quietly.
Really? I think I'd publish EVERY LAST BIT of info I had, as far and wide as possible, making it utterly useless to harm anyone over it. Patents, for one, and immediately and fully accessible to the public.
But I guess I flunked my tin-foil hat class.
Utter bullshit. This is nothing bug a straw man. I was clearly refering to people getting paid MORE than they were before, not MORE than "others" who happen to be dirt cheap.
No, that's the whole point. They aren't getting paid any more for their newfound "competency" than they were when they were just plain old engineers.
Nonsense. Inflation and "cost of living" are calculated to take into account lower cost goods and the like, and all these magical benefits aren't appearing, and sure as hell aren't offseting the declining pay.
Problem is, people aren't getting paid any more for their "higher value" work than they were for their "low value" work.
The problem with assertions like this is that you have to provide EVIDENCE to prove it, and you've provided none. This
Yes, but people aren't getting paid any more for their added efforts. That was the whole promise of The WTO, NAFTA, etc. It's supposed to be more "effecient" to outsource jobs, meaning higher incomes and cheaper products all-around, not more work for less money.