You just made me imagine a miniaturized NES, the size of a dime. You realize that right? Little SDHC goes in the tiny cart slot... Connects to TV using mini HDMI.. Bluetooth controllers.
Shame on you, making me imagine such a silly thing!
A flexible sheet of plastic is more durable inside a human body than is a silicon substrate. Especially in soft tissues, like brain tissues. It weighs less, and as such tugs less on the tissue when the subject moves around, theoretically resulting in less neural scar tissue.
Alternatively, REALLY cheap processors for consumer toys.
Ahh... But you see, hallucinations do NOT leave physical evidence behind.
(sorry for the late reply, but the version of IE I am forced to endure at work is unable to handle the new content system slashdot uses, and as such I am unable to post from there, and work second shift.)
The paranormal activity I have had the 'salubrious joy' of being exposed to involved (seemingly) psychokinetic motion, which damaged walls and other objects. Not all of the objects manipulated were metal, and some were quite large and heavy. No, it was not "Hutchinson effect" motion. (Let's put a camcorder in a box with some random junk and shake it up! WHEE!!!!) No. This is more things like sticky faucets turning themselves on, doors slamming (Both could arguably be hallucinations, but these latter cannot be.) doorknobs coming apart on their own after the screws turned themselves out of their threaddings (as in, screws on floor, doorknob in bits) , and objects flying into and embedding into walls. (as in, physically stuck in the wall, and or, causing physical damage to the wall and the hurled object.)
Needless to say, I dislike ghosts. They can be quite costly vermin infestations. I am quite happy my current home does not have such trouble.
I used to live in a haunted house, you insensitive clod! [lol]
That said, No, really, I really did. I don't know how such phenomena could be explained without some very tortured rationalisms, given what I have personally seen. Anecdotes are not evidence, and I don't expect you to believe me, or to change your opinion. If you are truly curious about the things I have personally experienced on this matter, I can entertain you for a while, but not in this post.
As for most professional ghost hunters, I find fault with some of their equipment, for purely geeky reasons. Such the use of digital personal voice recorders for collecting EVPs. This is bogus to me, for the simple reason that digital voice recorders use internal lossy (Lossy as hell, in fact!) codecs to store the audio data they collect. EVPs are supposed to be stored in "Inaudible" audio spectrum, which is EXACTLY what these codecs chop out to make the stream smaller. If you want to collect EVPs, get yourself an old fashioned reel to reel tape recorder, then digitize later with FLAC or PCM with a high bitrate. If anything, the artifacts left by lossy compression on those portions of the auditory spectrum are likely to cause FALSE POSITIVES than to detect genuine EVPs, should they happen.
I do have some interesting ideas for some elaborate ghost detection equipment of my own though, but given the shoe-string budgets that most of these "paranormal investigator" teams operate on, they would never be able to afford the PARTS, let alone the training needed to use what I have in mind, or to interpret the resulting data. (basic grasp of wave mechanics would be needed to evaluate some of the datasets in order to screen out the interesting data from the boring kind-- one of the devices I have in mind would make use of electromagnetic interference with various reference signals over a broad spread of the EM spectrum, not just visible and IR light. The device would basically emit a precise calibrated waveform that is a phase conjugate with the other frequencies being probed (they are all multiples of each other, so they do not interfere on their own, but instead have wave reinforcement.) The device measures any deviations from this ideal reference waveform from particle interactions. Since ghosts are presumed to emit/absorb electromagnetic energy, they should cause such perturbations in the reference signals by interacting with them.. Multiple frequency bands would help to constrain what kinds of interaction are (possibly) taking place, or if they are happening at all. Ideally, it would have receivers in both Near and Far field areas to record both kinds of interaction. The test rig would fill a whole room. This is just one of the theoretical devices I have in mind. )
When it comes to the validity of any "findings" that such teams come up with, I groan. Any data collected is only as good as the equipment and rigor of the team collecting it. It is VERY easy to find false positives and false trends in very noisy (eg, poorly calibrated/downright bad) data. Given the issue with the EVPs above, and the rather linear and simplistic tools that they use to collect such data, (Such devices are NOT meant for scientific research, but instead for simple domestic repairs, and to hunt down EMI radiation from wiring.) I can't help but groan when I watch them on TV.
I guess that makes me a walking contradiction-- I have personally experienced paranormal activity, but demand data. Maybe that is why I come up with ideas for instruments?
Lets browse the tablet internet market for a second...
For IOS, we have Apple's iPad. Strategy Analytics says that: IOS went from 95.5% market share of tablets in Q3 to 75.3% in Q4 2010.
Then we have "everyone else": Android went from 2.3% in Q3 to 21.6% in Q4. "all others" went from 2.3 in Q3 to 3.1 in Q4.
To me, this looks like android is spreading like wildfire in the tablet space. It snatched up more than 20% of market share in ONE QUARTER. While it is doubtful that growth like that is sustainable, even modest growth after a spurt like that could really put the screws to Apple.
The handsets sold in the US that accept SIM cards (not all do, as CDMA technology (Verizon and pals) does not make use of them) typically are "Branded"-- EG, they have been sublicensed and resold under the carrier's name, and have advertisements branded on the phone itself. (EG, your apple Motorolla phone also has an ATT logo on it.) Part of that branding practice is to "Touch" the phone's firmware so that it will outright reject any SIM card not made by that carrier.
This is why there is a big underground movement for unlocking (Carriers call it "Hacking", but that's not quite right either. You DO typically have to hack smart phones to unlock them though...) handsets, so that they can be used with the carrier of the user's choice.
Most US consumers are blind, ignorant, and bleating masses who are only interested in eating at the shiniest, fullest trough though, and are perfectly happy to get sheared in return. Because of this, abusive practices like exclusivity deals, sim-locking, price fixing, and a whole host of other nasty bad things go totally unstopped, and unquestioned.
I REALLY envy you, if you can buy any random handset, and use it with any random GSM service in south africa.
Exclusive partnerships, by their very nature, lock out competition and as such are innately anti-competitive.
Rather than seeing AT&T buy up besieged T-Mo (I use a T-mo prepaid sim in my smart phone, btw. No data plan, I use wifi hotspots for data.) I would rather see handset makers barred from signing exclusive backroom deals-- the whole "Give us $$$, and we'll partner exclusively!" shit has to end.
If the iPhone had been readily available on multiple carriers from the go, then at least two things would have been avoided. Namely, AT&T's network wouldnt have crashed into the floor from data service use, Verizon would have picked up a fair chunk of the iPhone userbase (Even if CDMA is inferior to GSM in this regard, being unable to use data while talking-- end users would not know that, nor notice, most likely), and T-Mobile would have been directly competitive with AT&T's offerings.
Instead you had a very sweet price inflation due to regulated supply coupled with excessive demand, which worked VERY nicely for Apple and AT&T, at the expense of the rest of the already under-competitive cellular market. It practically stinks of racketeering. (Yes, I know this threat is passed now, with the new exception in the DMCA for it, yet in the historical period I am railing against Apple+ATT really did play the That's a nice iPhone you have there, shame if something were to happen to it. card to keep iphone users from letting the air out of their price inflation scheme.)
The REAL solution is to ban these kinds of backroom deals, and enforce against them. (Sadly, no money-minded politician will campaign for, or enact such a provision, because killing backroom deals would kill a good portion of their "Campaign Funding")
If you would look past the obvious, see the sarcasm, and note the last sentence you would realize that my point was *NOT* that computer manufacturers would all dry up and die.
I said that they would have to change their business model.
VERY big difference. Maytag and Co. have a thriving after-market parts division, that make obsolete parts for old appliances. They make money on support. EG-- A service savvy enterprise.
HP does similar things with printer components, and they leverage the aftermarket component costs to "Just coincidentally" make it advantageous to the customer to buy "New." Fancy that.
When computer technology reaches miniturization saturation, they will end up being commodity items, because it will be non-trivial to make a "Better, market-cornering one." In that respect, they would become like simple calculators. A simple calculator is a simple calculator. They all do the same things. The selling point after that is, how long do they last, and what service and support comes with purchase? How much does the support contract cost, what use restrictions come with that service, etc... Very different from the product cycles of say, Microsoft and Apple. (Come get the newest, shiniest APPLE IPHONE X! The thinnest, sexiest iPhone YET! [nevermind that you already have an iphone-- this one has a higher density display! but still, no porn on it. Steve says so.])
Ironically enough, Microsoft seems to see that handwriting on the wall, and is heatedly trying to push its new cloud platform--- which is the quintessence of the service industry and its kind of offering. Too bad they are pushing the draconian bullshit up front as well, limiting their chances of market penetration... But its their funeral I suppose.
Next time, you and the other 10 people that failed to have your sarcasmometers peg an 11 should really have them professionally calibrated.
I love the strawmen-- tell me, do they come with brains? I dont want to have to see the wizard about it later---
That said, I actually liked XP. Preferred 2000 for the cleaner UI, but XP was all in all a very decent buyware OS. Sadly, they took the part I hated about XP and spun it as their latest selling point: Namely, Bloated, needlessly overworked UI and dumbed down controls. Such is how I view Vista and win7.
Love how you categorize me as an RMS beard worshiping freetard though.
Except for product that really shouldn't ever really wear out---
Excepting for REALLY bad designs, normal operating load on an integrated circuit should have it last many times longer than it's predicted obsolescence by moore's law. You can find perfectly functional Atari STs and IBM XTs even today, more than 20 years later.
compare to shoes, which wear out as a consequence of use (like brake pads on cars..) or refrigerators, which have moving parts (The compressor, and pals)--- the solid-state electronics industry produces products that, unless you PURPOSEFULLY design them to fail over time with kill switches, should last a VERY VERY long time.
This is why I see a service industry instead of a product industry. If you sell hardware and software together as a "Service Package" with a monthly bill, as long as that bill remains cheaper than keeping an on-hand IT staff, it will be mutually profitable to both the offerer of the service (Who now gets paid continuously every month, and has economic incentive to produce quality goods they dont have to support as aggressively) and to the subscriber of the service.
"There's no point letting it go unused most of the time because you have super fast immediate software that took ages to develop."
Sure there is. When the silicon is idle, it draws less power. Lower power draw increases battery life for portable devices, lower operating temperatures and lower overall utility bills. Part of the problem with current industrial society is that it gobbles energy like a child in a candy store. Is your contribution to this problem a solution, or a compounding factor?
The notion that something isn't useful unless you have it running at 100% constantly is fallacious. I'd prefer it to operate on a modest power supply, up until I actually NEEDED that raw power-- EG, when I am just typing up a word processing document, I don't want my battery to be depleted just because the software development firm considers my CPU's processing power to be expendable. The word processing application (And the OS in general!) should be as efficient as possible, so that I can get more work done. Likewise, if everything in my system is vying for clock cycles you end up with contention issues. Multiple cores helps this somewhat, but at the expense of greater energy consumption...
Stop considering my CPU to be expendable. Treat it like a scarce resource, even when it isn't. I'll value your software a whole lot more.
If your existing refrigerator is perfectly good, then what incentive do you have to buy the NEW refrigerator? If you don't buy NEW refrigerators, how does the refrigerator manufacturer stay in business?
For a more geek friendly variant on this, look at microsoft. Their last 3 "New" versions have mostly been about Microsoft's bottom line, and been less about true innovation. (EG--look how hard they are trying to kill windows XP.)
When you reach a point where your company can no longer just add bloat, call it new, and sell them like hotcakes because the existing product is arguably just as good, if not better, due to physical limitations of the device, then you end up with profitability grinding to a halt, and industry suffering mightily.
What you would see instead, is a service-industry created, instead of a product-industry.... Oh wait, we already are!
The beauty of a klystron is that it can serve as an amplifier. In the bunching section of the homebrew klystron, you insert a generic USB WiFi dongle. The signal from the dongle does the initial attenuation that causes the bunching in the klystron-- that is to say, it is the source of the reference signal.
The output cavity is then directed outward, away from the wifi dongle, and toward your target with a waveguide. The wifi dongle's reception ability should be mostly unaffected by this.
Perhaps if you replaced the magnetron with a custom built klystron of similar size, it would work.
There are any number of "Extremely small" CRT devices you can get for pennies. (Like the eye-pieces of old VHS camcorders) These are basically a vacuum tube type electron gun, and which with some modifications, could be used to drive such a tiny klystron quite effectively.
It endangers the foolish notion that IP==Identity.
If any random stranger can connect to your WiFi, even if you have secured it with a reasonably strong WPA2 password, then suddenly it becomes much more difficult for large corporations to finger you for whatever kind of digital content violation happens to be popular at the time, just because your router had leased that IP from the ISP at the time.
As such, large corporations with incentive to be litigious and to forcibly equate IP with Identity for the purposes of "enforcement" will bend over backwards to make sure that this ruling gets trashed.
IP protectionism isn't just for the US anymore you know.
Meh, you get the gist. Still, the content of the message "STOP X before Y so atrocity Z never happens!" would instantly look like crack pottery to the residents of that target timeframe, who 1) View themselves as being in the now, 2) view timetravel as impossible, and 3) cling to the idea of free will like a life preserver.
Especially when "X" is averted "naturally" shortly after the message arrives anyway.
See my prior post about sending somebody with a bucket of pond scum to a distant theoretically habitable planet in it's distant past.
Let's say that we send somebody to a planet that is outside of the light cone of our being able to observe this planet (we'll include technological developments, so 100 years sounds good. Any object 100 light years away should be safe to interact with, as long as we do not screw with it's emission spectra), carrying a hardened ceramic artifact (needs to be geologically stable), and a bucket of pond scum, at the same time we intend to send a ship to that planet to investigate it (only needs to be a probe.) We send the person with the bucket of pond scum and the artifact to the planetoid. They deliver the pondscum to the planet's primordial ocean, jumpstarting life on that planet in a serious fashion. They then deposit the artifact on say-- the planetoid's moon, in a pre-arranged location. (For the sake of not marooning the person in a lifeless past on a distant planet, we could say this is a probe as well.)
We then, 100 years later in our present, send our mission to the planet, with mission objectives to examine the seed site, and the location of the artifact on the lunar surface.
If we "Discover" life on the planet with earth-like algal species, AND discover the artifact on the moon, did we just prove the time machine worked?
A better way to look at that theory is to say that all possible time-lines exist "Timelessly", and that the time travel trick is simply a means for these causally linked outcome states to share information; However, due to the divergent nature of the beast in question, the information sent might not be terribly useful.
Example in danger of causing Godwin:
Say, We send a message back to the 20s about the dangers of Hitler's rise to power and the assassination of the Arch Duke, in order to prevent the second world war and the atrocities it spawned... Only to have the message arrive in a time interval where shortly thereafter, Hitler dies after the paper mill he works at catches fire, and the assassin of the arch duke dies fatefully in a vehicular accident before he can kill the duke. The message then looks like nothing other than the rantings of a crackpot.
Since we are talking theoretical crackpottery here...
My personal take on time travel is that the universe itself will prevent you from time traveling, if the effect of said time travel would in any way impact your personal timeline.
EG-- The time machine will mysteriously malfunction every time you push the magic button, if your intended goal is to travel back in time and murder either your past self, or one of your direct ancestors. It does this to avoid a paradox, (rather, it is the observed result of the timeline imploding every time you push the button, and eliminating that possible outcome, leaving only the "improbable" outcome of the time machine mysteriously breaking all the time instead.)
If, however, your intention is to travel back in time to some place that your timeline has never crossed previously (Say, going to a different star system 10 billion years in the past with a bucket of pond scum for the LULZ) Since that star system's radiant output will not impact the course of events of earth in any measurable way, the universe will happily let you push the button, and merrily drop you there at your destination, bucket in hand. Your presence at the destination will not impact the course of events that led to your creating the time machine, collecting the scum in the bucket, the discovery of the potentially habitable planet, and finally pushing the button to go there; It is harmless to causality.
This of course, requires that the universe be rather malleable; While the earth's timeline did not change, the timeline of the lifeless planetoid that you just splashed with pond scum certainly had it's timeline changed in a radical fashion; What happens then? Good question; Is the destruction of previous time-lines localized, or does it propagate through the whole universe?
I would conjecture that it is localized to within the lightcone of the event's taking place, to the time in which the time machine was activated. (In the scenario with the pondscum, that would be a 10 billion light year light cone effected.)
But again, this is just theoretical crackpottery as far as I know.
Total power consumption metered at the pole can easily exceed 3kwh peak if you have these 5 appliances:
1) Electric clothes dryer (Energy costs of a typical electric heater are around.60$ a load. Running it with the AC on *WILL* cause >3kwh peak.) 2) Deep freezer 3) Refrigerator 4) Air conditioner 5) Electric heating (The underside of the radiant oil-filled heater my sister installed in her mother-in-law's home says it draws 1.5kwh. That is half of your budget right there.)
That said, the rest of your argument is sound.
What I did when I calculated what my power needs would be for (in my case) wind power for a rural, off-grid home, was to calculate the total "OMG, extremely wasteful energy practices in motion!" conditions, where *EVERY* appliance is electric, turned on, and running full tilt (including incandescent lightbulbs)--- Take that use value, add 20% for conversion losses in the battery array, and use that as the baseline requirement for the wind charging system.
My analysis with those values stated that my property would need 4 1.2kw wind generators, or 4.8kw raw production to keep it running.
Based on that, I determined that "Luxurious, off grid living" is possible in my area using wind energy, as long as you don't mind having a turbine in each of the corners of your property. (My area has an annual mean wind speed of 12mph, which is what makes wind energy a suitable energy source, even with battery losses.)
Solar would be too space prohibitive to try to produce that much energy reliably with existing consumer grade equipment, given that my area is prone to thunderstorms (eg, gets cloudy in the summer months, when AC peak use would be prevalent.)
I would argue that you don't. I am not implying that you are dumb or anything, really. However, dumping radiological waste product back into the mine is a very very very very very bad idea.
The uranium extraction process used in industrial mining does *NOT* remove 100% of the potentially breed-able/fissile material, and also the sequestration process for the reactor waste products (being cast into a block of borosilicate glass) does not arrest the flow of radioactive energy from the material.
By sequestering the reactor waste in the same hole you dug up the fuel from, you would ultimately transform the uranium mine site into a subteranean nuclear reactor, sans any kind of control rod based shutdown procedure. The waste blocks are not the fuel in such a turn of events- they are simply a catalytic agent that transforms the residual uranium ore into fissile isotopes, and then kicks off the reaction in the bedrock.
A better idea is to utilize the high-longevity radioactive waste for passive nuclear power generation. Essentially, the passive radiological emissions (as opposed to active induced fission in a nuclear reactor) of the glass-cast waste blocks is used to generate heat, which in turn is used to generate power. This would let you get low(er) levels of power out of the waste for thousands of years, theoretically. (Before people tell me that this is unsuitable, I remind them that reasonably small devices can power big deep field satellites, like those sent to Jupiter a few decades ago, and worked just fine. Passive nuclear has improved tremendously since then.) Alternatively, if the waste has strong beta emissions, you could couple it directly to semiconductor sheets, and have solid state power generation.
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That being, that they (State and federal governments) are spending too much money already.
How about they do something a little more useful, like impose a moratorium on new expenditures until the economic crisis is over?
Oh dear-- I just imagined government workers being cautious with other people's money! How silly of me!
You just made me imagine a miniaturized NES, the size of a dime. You realize that right? Little SDHC goes in the tiny cart slot... Connects to TV using mini HDMI.. Bluetooth controllers.
Shame on you, making me imagine such a silly thing!
BCI devices.
A flexible sheet of plastic is more durable inside a human body than is a silicon substrate. Especially in soft tissues, like brain tissues. It weighs less, and as such tugs less on the tissue when the subject moves around, theoretically resulting in less neural scar tissue.
Alternatively, REALLY cheap processors for consumer toys.
Ahh... But you see, hallucinations do NOT leave physical evidence behind.
(sorry for the late reply, but the version of IE I am forced to endure at work is unable to handle the new content system slashdot uses, and as such I am unable to post from there, and work second shift.)
The paranormal activity I have had the 'salubrious joy' of being exposed to involved (seemingly) psychokinetic motion, which damaged walls and other objects. Not all of the objects manipulated were metal, and some were quite large and heavy. No, it was not "Hutchinson effect" motion. (Let's put a camcorder in a box with some random junk and shake it up! WHEE!!!!) No. This is more things like sticky faucets turning themselves on, doors slamming (Both could arguably be hallucinations, but these latter cannot be.) doorknobs coming apart on their own after the screws turned themselves out of their threaddings (as in, screws on floor, doorknob in bits) , and objects flying into and embedding into walls. (as in, physically stuck in the wall, and or, causing physical damage to the wall and the hurled object.)
Needless to say, I dislike ghosts. They can be quite costly vermin infestations. I am quite happy my current home does not have such trouble.
I used to live in a haunted house, you insensitive clod!
[lol]
That said, No, really, I really did. I don't know how such phenomena could be explained without some very tortured rationalisms, given what I have personally seen.
Anecdotes are not evidence, and I don't expect you to believe me, or to change your opinion. If you are truly curious about the things I have personally experienced on this matter, I can entertain you for a while, but not in this post.
As for most professional ghost hunters, I find fault with some of their equipment, for purely geeky reasons. Such the use of digital personal voice recorders for collecting EVPs. This is bogus to me, for the simple reason that digital voice recorders use internal lossy (Lossy as hell, in fact!) codecs to store the audio data they collect. EVPs are supposed to be stored in "Inaudible" audio spectrum, which is EXACTLY what these codecs chop out to make the stream smaller. If you want to collect EVPs, get yourself an old fashioned reel to reel tape recorder, then digitize later with FLAC or PCM with a high bitrate. If anything, the artifacts left by lossy compression on those portions of the auditory spectrum are likely to cause FALSE POSITIVES than to detect genuine EVPs, should they happen.
I do have some interesting ideas for some elaborate ghost detection equipment of my own though, but given the shoe-string budgets that most of these "paranormal investigator" teams operate on, they would never be able to afford the PARTS, let alone the training needed to use what I have in mind, or to interpret the resulting data. (basic grasp of wave mechanics would be needed to evaluate some of the datasets in order to screen out the interesting data from the boring kind-- one of the devices I have in mind would make use of electromagnetic interference with various reference signals over a broad spread of the EM spectrum, not just visible and IR light. The device would basically emit a precise calibrated waveform that is a phase conjugate with the other frequencies being probed (they are all multiples of each other, so they do not interfere on their own, but instead have wave reinforcement.) The device measures any deviations from this ideal reference waveform from particle interactions. Since ghosts are presumed to emit/absorb electromagnetic energy, they should cause such perturbations in the reference signals by interacting with them.. Multiple frequency bands would help to constrain what kinds of interaction are (possibly) taking place, or if they are happening at all. Ideally, it would have receivers in both Near and Far field areas to record both kinds of interaction. The test rig would fill a whole room. This is just one of the theoretical devices I have in mind. )
When it comes to the validity of any "findings" that such teams come up with, I groan. Any data collected is only as good as the equipment and rigor of the team collecting it. It is VERY easy to find false positives and false trends in very noisy (eg, poorly calibrated/downright bad) data. Given the issue with the EVPs above, and the rather linear and simplistic tools that they use to collect such data, (Such devices are NOT meant for scientific research, but instead for simple domestic repairs, and to hunt down EMI radiation from wiring.) I can't help but groan when I watch them on TV.
I guess that makes me a walking contradiction-- I have personally experienced paranormal activity, but demand data. Maybe that is why I come up with ideas for instruments?
Well...
Lets browse the tablet internet market for a second...
For IOS, we have Apple's iPad. Strategy Analytics says that:
IOS went from 95.5% market share of tablets in Q3 to 75.3% in Q4 2010.
Then we have "everyone else":
Android went from 2.3% in Q3 to 21.6% in Q4.
"all others" went from 2.3 in Q3 to 3.1 in Q4.
To me, this looks like android is spreading like wildfire in the tablet space. It snatched up more than 20% of market share in ONE QUARTER. While it is doubtful that growth like that is sustainable, even modest growth after a spurt like that could really put the screws to Apple.
Damn typos. That should have been "Apple or motorola", not "Apple motorola". Gah.
Carry on.
The handsets sold in the US that accept SIM cards (not all do, as CDMA technology (Verizon and pals) does not make use of them) typically are "Branded"-- EG, they have been sublicensed and resold under the carrier's name, and have advertisements branded on the phone itself. (EG, your apple Motorolla phone also has an ATT logo on it.) Part of that branding practice is to "Touch" the phone's firmware so that it will outright reject any SIM card not made by that carrier.
This is why there is a big underground movement for unlocking (Carriers call it "Hacking", but that's not quite right either. You DO typically have to hack smart phones to unlock them though...) handsets, so that they can be used with the carrier of the user's choice.
Most US consumers are blind, ignorant, and bleating masses who are only interested in eating at the shiniest, fullest trough though, and are perfectly happy to get sheared in return. Because of this, abusive practices like exclusivity deals, sim-locking, price fixing, and a whole host of other nasty bad things go totally unstopped, and unquestioned.
I REALLY envy you, if you can buy any random handset, and use it with any random GSM service in south africa.
Exclusive partnerships, by their very nature, lock out competition and as such are innately anti-competitive.
Rather than seeing AT&T buy up besieged T-Mo (I use a T-mo prepaid sim in my smart phone, btw. No data plan, I use wifi hotspots for data.) I would rather see handset makers barred from signing exclusive backroom deals-- the whole "Give us $$$, and we'll partner exclusively!" shit has to end.
If the iPhone had been readily available on multiple carriers from the go, then at least two things would have been avoided. Namely, AT&T's network wouldnt have crashed into the floor from data service use, Verizon would have picked up a fair chunk of the iPhone userbase (Even if CDMA is inferior to GSM in this regard, being unable to use data while talking-- end users would not know that, nor notice, most likely), and T-Mobile would have been directly competitive with AT&T's offerings.
Instead you had a very sweet price inflation due to regulated supply coupled with excessive demand, which worked VERY nicely for Apple and AT&T, at the expense of the rest of the already under-competitive cellular market. It practically stinks of racketeering. (Yes, I know this threat is passed now, with the new exception in the DMCA for it, yet in the historical period I am railing against Apple+ATT really did play the That's a nice iPhone you have there, shame if something were to happen to it. card to keep iphone users from letting the air out of their price inflation scheme.)
The REAL solution is to ban these kinds of backroom deals, and enforce against them. (Sadly, no money-minded politician will campaign for, or enact such a provision, because killing backroom deals would kill a good portion of their "Campaign Funding")
I fucking HATE apple right now.
*Sigh*...
If you would look past the obvious, see the sarcasm, and note the last sentence you would realize that my point was *NOT* that computer manufacturers would all dry up and die.
I said that they would have to change their business model.
VERY big difference. Maytag and Co. have a thriving after-market parts division, that make obsolete parts for old appliances. They make money on support. EG-- A service savvy enterprise.
HP does similar things with printer components, and they leverage the aftermarket component costs to "Just coincidentally" make it advantageous to the customer to buy "New." Fancy that.
When computer technology reaches miniturization saturation, they will end up being commodity items, because it will be non-trivial to make a "Better, market-cornering one." In that respect, they would become like simple calculators. A simple calculator is a simple calculator. They all do the same things. The selling point after that is, how long do they last, and what service and support comes with purchase? How much does the support contract cost, what use restrictions come with that service, etc... Very different from the product cycles of say, Microsoft and Apple. (Come get the newest, shiniest APPLE IPHONE X! The thinnest, sexiest iPhone YET! [nevermind that you already have an iphone-- this one has a higher density display! but still, no porn on it. Steve says so.])
Ironically enough, Microsoft seems to see that handwriting on the wall, and is heatedly trying to push its new cloud platform--- which is the quintessence of the service industry and its kind of offering. Too bad they are pushing the draconian bullshit up front as well, limiting their chances of market penetration... But its their funeral I suppose.
Next time, you and the other 10 people that failed to have your sarcasmometers peg an 11 should really have them professionally calibrated.
I love the strawmen-- tell me, do they come with brains? I dont want to have to see the wizard about it later---
That said, I actually liked XP. Preferred 2000 for the cleaner UI, but XP was all in all a very decent buyware OS. Sadly, they took the part I hated about XP and spun it as their latest selling point: Namely, Bloated, needlessly overworked UI and dumbed down controls. Such is how I view Vista and win7.
Love how you categorize me as an RMS beard worshiping freetard though.
Except for product that really shouldn't ever really wear out---
Excepting for REALLY bad designs, normal operating load on an integrated circuit should have it last many times longer than it's predicted obsolescence by moore's law. You can find perfectly functional Atari STs and IBM XTs even today, more than 20 years later.
compare to shoes, which wear out as a consequence of use (like brake pads on cars..) or refrigerators, which have moving parts (The compressor, and pals)--- the solid-state electronics industry produces products that, unless you PURPOSEFULLY design them to fail over time with kill switches, should last a VERY VERY long time.
This is why I see a service industry instead of a product industry. If you sell hardware and software together as a "Service Package" with a monthly bill, as long as that bill remains cheaper than keeping an on-hand IT staff, it will be mutually profitable to both the offerer of the service (Who now gets paid continuously every month, and has economic incentive to produce quality goods they dont have to support as aggressively) and to the subscriber of the service.
"There's no point letting it go unused most of the time because you have super fast immediate software that took ages to develop."
Sure there is. When the silicon is idle, it draws less power. Lower power draw increases battery life for portable devices, lower operating temperatures and lower overall utility bills. Part of the problem with current industrial society is that it gobbles energy like a child in a candy store. Is your contribution to this problem a solution, or a compounding factor?
The notion that something isn't useful unless you have it running at 100% constantly is fallacious. I'd prefer it to operate on a modest power supply, up until I actually NEEDED that raw power-- EG, when I am just typing up a word processing document, I don't want my battery to be depleted just because the software development firm considers my CPU's processing power to be expendable. The word processing application (And the OS in general!) should be as efficient as possible, so that I can get more work done. Likewise, if everything in my system is vying for clock cycles you end up with contention issues. Multiple cores helps this somewhat, but at the expense of greater energy consumption...
Stop considering my CPU to be expendable. Treat it like a scarce resource, even when it isn't. I'll value your software a whole lot more.
amusingly, that only confirms Kaku's prediction.
If your existing refrigerator is perfectly good, then what incentive do you have to buy the NEW refrigerator?
If you don't buy NEW refrigerators, how does the refrigerator manufacturer stay in business?
For a more geek friendly variant on this, look at microsoft. Their last 3 "New" versions have mostly been about Microsoft's bottom line, and been less about true innovation. (EG--look how hard they are trying to kill windows XP.)
When you reach a point where your company can no longer just add bloat, call it new, and sell them like hotcakes because the existing product is arguably just as good, if not better, due to physical limitations of the device, then you end up with profitability grinding to a halt, and industry suffering mightily.
What you would see instead, is a service-industry created, instead of a product-industry.... Oh wait, we already are!
The beauty of a klystron is that it can serve as an amplifier. In the bunching section of the homebrew klystron, you insert a generic USB WiFi dongle. The signal from the dongle does the initial attenuation that causes the bunching in the klystron-- that is to say, it is the source of the reference signal.
The output cavity is then directed outward, away from the wifi dongle, and toward your target with a waveguide. The wifi dongle's reception ability should be mostly unaffected by this.
Perhaps if you replaced the magnetron with a custom built klystron of similar size, it would work.
There are any number of "Extremely small" CRT devices you can get for pennies. (Like the eye-pieces of old VHS camcorders) These are basically a vacuum tube type electron gun, and which with some modifications, could be used to drive such a tiny klystron quite effectively.
[really blurry image I found on the internet depicting the tiny size of the CRT in question]
Amusingly, you could probably use the already existing magnetic deflection system of the CRT to help modulate the beam inside the klystron waveguide.
Obligatory wikipedia on Klystrons
Using one of those as the transmitter of your directional antenna would net you a VERY long distance connection.
It endangers the foolish notion that IP==Identity.
If any random stranger can connect to your WiFi, even if you have secured it with a reasonably strong WPA2 password, then suddenly it becomes much more difficult for large corporations to finger you for whatever kind of digital content violation happens to be popular at the time, just because your router had leased that IP from the ISP at the time.
As such, large corporations with incentive to be litigious and to forcibly equate IP with Identity for the purposes of "enforcement" will bend over backwards to make sure that this ruling gets trashed.
IP protectionism isn't just for the US anymore you know.
Meh, you get the gist. Still, the content of the message "STOP X before Y so atrocity Z never happens!" would instantly look like crack pottery to the residents of that target timeframe, who 1) View themselves as being in the now, 2) view timetravel as impossible, and 3) cling to the idea of free will like a life preserver.
Especially when "X" is averted "naturally" shortly after the message arrives anyway.
See my prior post about sending somebody with a bucket of pond scum to a distant theoretically habitable planet in it's distant past.
Let's say that we send somebody to a planet that is outside of the light cone of our being able to observe this planet (we'll include technological developments, so 100 years sounds good. Any object 100 light years away should be safe to interact with, as long as we do not screw with it's emission spectra), carrying a hardened ceramic artifact (needs to be geologically stable), and a bucket of pond scum, at the same time we intend to send a ship to that planet to investigate it (only needs to be a probe.) We send the person with the bucket of pond scum and the artifact to the planetoid. They deliver the pondscum to the planet's primordial ocean, jumpstarting life on that planet in a serious fashion. They then deposit the artifact on say-- the planetoid's moon, in a pre-arranged location. (For the sake of not marooning the person in a lifeless past on a distant planet, we could say this is a probe as well.)
We then, 100 years later in our present, send our mission to the planet, with mission objectives to examine the seed site, and the location of the artifact on the lunar surface.
If we "Discover" life on the planet with earth-like algal species, AND discover the artifact on the moon, did we just prove the time machine worked?
A better way to look at that theory is to say that all possible time-lines exist "Timelessly", and that the time travel trick is simply a means for these causally linked outcome states to share information; However, due to the divergent nature of the beast in question, the information sent might not be terribly useful.
Example in danger of causing Godwin:
Say, We send a message back to the 20s about the dangers of Hitler's rise to power and the assassination of the Arch Duke, in order to prevent the second world war and the atrocities it spawned... Only to have the message arrive in a time interval where shortly thereafter, Hitler dies after the paper mill he works at catches fire, and the assassin of the arch duke dies fatefully in a vehicular accident before he can kill the duke. The message then looks like nothing other than the rantings of a crackpot.
Since we are talking theoretical crackpottery here...
My personal take on time travel is that the universe itself will prevent you from time traveling, if the effect of said time travel would in any way impact your personal timeline.
EG-- The time machine will mysteriously malfunction every time you push the magic button, if your intended goal is to travel back in time and murder either your past self, or one of your direct ancestors. It does this to avoid a paradox, (rather, it is the observed result of the timeline imploding every time you push the button, and eliminating that possible outcome, leaving only the "improbable" outcome of the time machine mysteriously breaking all the time instead.)
If, however, your intention is to travel back in time to some place that your timeline has never crossed previously (Say, going to a different star system 10 billion years in the past with a bucket of pond scum for the LULZ) Since that star system's radiant output will not impact the course of events of earth in any measurable way, the universe will happily let you push the button, and merrily drop you there at your destination, bucket in hand. Your presence at the destination will not impact the course of events that led to your creating the time machine, collecting the scum in the bucket, the discovery of the potentially habitable planet, and finally pushing the button to go there; It is harmless to causality.
This of course, requires that the universe be rather malleable; While the earth's timeline did not change, the timeline of the lifeless planetoid that you just splashed with pond scum certainly had it's timeline changed in a radical fashion; What happens then? Good question; Is the destruction of previous time-lines localized, or does it propagate through the whole universe?
I would conjecture that it is localized to within the lightcone of the event's taking place, to the time in which the time machine was activated. (In the scenario with the pondscum, that would be a 10 billion light year light cone effected.)
But again, this is just theoretical crackpottery as far as I know.
Total power consumption metered at the pole can easily exceed 3kwh peak if you have these 5 appliances:
1) Electric clothes dryer (Energy costs of a typical electric heater are around .60$ a load. Running it with the AC on *WILL* cause >3kwh peak.)
2) Deep freezer
3) Refrigerator
4) Air conditioner
5) Electric heating (The underside of the radiant oil-filled heater my sister installed in her mother-in-law's home says it draws 1.5kwh. That is half of your budget right there.)
That said, the rest of your argument is sound.
What I did when I calculated what my power needs would be for (in my case) wind power for a rural, off-grid home, was to calculate the total "OMG, extremely wasteful energy practices in motion!" conditions, where *EVERY* appliance is electric, turned on, and running full tilt (including incandescent lightbulbs)--- Take that use value, add 20% for conversion losses in the battery array, and use that as the baseline requirement for the wind charging system.
My analysis with those values stated that my property would need 4 1.2kw wind generators, or 4.8kw raw production to keep it running.
Based on that, I determined that "Luxurious, off grid living" is possible in my area using wind energy, as long as you don't mind having a turbine in each of the corners of your property. (My area has an annual mean wind speed of 12mph, which is what makes wind energy a suitable energy source, even with battery losses.)
Solar would be too space prohibitive to try to produce that much energy reliably with existing consumer grade equipment, given that my area is prone to thunderstorms (eg, gets cloudy in the summer months, when AC peak use would be prevalent.)
I would argue that you don't. I am not implying that you are dumb or anything, really. However, dumping radiological waste product back into the mine is a very very very very very bad idea.
The uranium extraction process used in industrial mining does *NOT* remove 100% of the potentially breed-able/fissile material, and also the sequestration process for the reactor waste products (being cast into a block of borosilicate glass) does not arrest the flow of radioactive energy from the material.
By sequestering the reactor waste in the same hole you dug up the fuel from, you would ultimately transform the uranium mine site into a subteranean nuclear reactor, sans any kind of control rod based shutdown procedure. The waste blocks are not the fuel in such a turn of events- they are simply a catalytic agent that transforms the residual uranium ore into fissile isotopes, and then kicks off the reaction in the bedrock.
A better idea is to utilize the high-longevity radioactive waste for passive nuclear power generation. Essentially, the passive radiological emissions (as opposed to active induced fission in a nuclear reactor) of the glass-cast waste blocks is used to generate heat, which in turn is used to generate power. This would let you get low(er) levels of power out of the waste for thousands of years, theoretically. (Before people tell me that this is unsuitable, I remind them that reasonably small devices can power big deep field satellites, like those sent to Jupiter a few decades ago, and worked just fine. Passive nuclear has improved tremendously since then.) Alternatively, if the waste has strong beta emissions, you could couple it directly to semiconductor sheets, and have solid state power generation.
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda takes too long to input and process.
(Also, it makes it harder to recover the the system updates that the area 51 staff would want to collect from the crashed mothership afterwards.)
If these are simple 2D drawings, but in some arbitrary format, it might be possible to convert the data...
What extension do the files have?
(Note, I am a professional CAD operator.)