I would be interested to know if the technology to boost bandwidth on copper might also help push bandwidth out further. A lot of us rural folk still don't have a lot of choices when it comes to broadband and all of them are expensive.
I've got two strikes against me before we can truly be free of subscription TV (BellTV satellite service). One, we're in Canada, so we lack much of the "Hulu-type" streaming options. Two, we're on a farm well away from decent bandwidth, stuck with satellite internet service. We do the best we can with torrents downloaded overnight (the FAP doesn't cut in in the middle of the night), Zip.ca DVD rental-by-mail and recently discovered there's quite a lot of true FTA content on the old C-band dish (using an Openbox S9 receiver) and have really gotten into watching the RTV affiliates that way. Emergency! and Magnum PI are far and away better viewing than Survivor and Dancing with the Stars!
So anyway, the BellTV subscription is just the minimum plus sports and threatening to quit made them give us a better rate for the next year.
I hope we don't find ourselves in a situation as we do with full-size computers where ads and sales-droids are telling us that SuperMultiCore Machine X is "perfect for email, web browsing and organizing your recipe collection". I don't want to see multicore phones trying to make up for sloppy coding and configuration.
I notice that most of your situations involve a semi at fault. I'd like to point out that more often than not it's the idiot in the four-wheeler who's at fault because he doesn't look before he tries to cross a highway and is plowed into by an innocent semi. Almost every fatality involving a semi around here comes from that situation. I'd be very impressed if Volvo can produce a car that allows anyone to survive that kind of "accident".
OK, but I don't think six billion people would fit in the Fertile Crescent.
Oh, wait...we had explorers that had the courage to take to the stormy seas in fragile craft without accurate navigation. Unmanned space missions are good for gathering information but there might come a time when we need to get out there to make use of what we learn whether it be for science or for commercial use.
It's really quite sad to see another step backward in human spaceflight. I grew up in the '80s when the shuttle was exciting but thought we'd have progressed beyond it by now. As a child a space station meant a large circular wheel with a central hub that thousands of people were living on and which was stepping off point for missions further out. Much as I appreciate the science going on with what we have, it sure would be nice if mankind was a little bolder.
The acronym or what it stands for? I always wondered that. Maybe companys and organizations have a whole team of people who's sole job is to brainstorm cool acronyms and then figure out words to fit.
Anyway, I still think this exercise would be cool to watch.
It's my understanding subs tend to listen for what's out there because using one's own sonar would broadcast your own position to the enemy. If both these subs were running in this way I can see how a collision would occur. It's happened before and is bound to happen again.
I live on a farm in a very rural area of southern Saskatchewan, Canada. A year ago I heard a wireless provider (a private company) was lighting up a tower nearby so naturally I was pretty excited about getting a high speed internet connection finally. I'd been on dialup and didn't want to go the satellite route (for all the usual reasons). I'm about eight miles from the tower and could see the flashing light on top at night. Unfortunately I learned the antenna on the tower was installed only half-way up the tower...and at that height it was behind some hills...which means no line-of-sight! To rub it in even more our phone company called to sell us DSL by mistake and swore up and down that we could get it despite being seven miles from the nearest town.
So here I am on satellite and at times wish was still on dialup. $55/month for 512k sat. It would have been $45 for 1.5Mb wireless. Our phone company (SaskTel, a government-owned company) also operates wireless towers but despite one of their cell towers being about five miles away (and fully visible to me) they haven't yet put an internet transmitter on it. There's some hope they will in the not-to-distant future though.
Your reply mentioning a battle of wills and calves in wire reminded me of the trouble I've had with bulls. One year we had a Hereford bull run ahead of the herd to try and cut them off while we tried to roundup. No way was he going to let us take his girls! We finally gave up and rounded up a different herd. And twice in the past two years we've had a bull try to go over a fence to visit the neighbors' herd only to get stuck halfway because he couldn't get his back legs over. The first time I think he spent a couple of days there before I found him. The second I knew they'd been hanging around the fence so I was checking every day.
In a week our two I'll be rounding up to get rid of a couple of cows with murderous intentions...and that's a whole different challenge!
I work with cattle for a living, both my own and helping neighbors. I see it over and over. There are definitely leaders in a herd but there are also cattle that will not follow unless you get behind them and get them moving in the right direction. Maybe there's a slow one who stepped in a hole yesterday. Maybe the calf has picked that moment to get a snack and the mother stops for it to suck. Or it's the nervous cow that heads for the hills at the first sign of a roundup. Hell, there's even leader cows who decide to go different directions. Cattle like routine and if they don't usually go a certain direction they don't really feel like going there. Many times I've had a herd approach an open gate and stop. After a few minutes of trying to get them to go through they scatter. But often the first place they head when I start trying to round them up is where they go to drink water because it's what they do every day.
I hope this is just an idea for the smaller UPS trucks. A tractor-trailer driver would kill someone who forced him to make a right when he didn't have to. It might save a few insensitive clods in cars who try to scoot through on the right of a truck trying to make his wide right turn. We're even taught to swing right, then left, then right again to try to keep the rear of the trailer far enough right to cut down on that gap while still giving us room to get everything around the corner without curb-hopping while keeping the smaller four-wheelers safely out of that gap. So I've seen a saying somewhere that says "Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do." It's just easier that way for semi drivers.
I held out for the exact same reason, and of course signed up for the exaxt same reasons as you. I was so tired of having to get accounts for everything. Oh well, our ID numbers are still pretty low.
I have a family that needs my attention most of the time. I have a wife, a 3-1/2 year old boy and one-year-old twin boys so I rarely get a chance to play my games. Maybe I get to play once every week or two, usually not for more than an hour. I recently purchased GT Legends (a racing game) and found that most of it required unlocking. With my schedule of play by the time I unlocked all the cars and tracks...well, I actually probably would have given up before I got that far. If you don't get enough time to learn tracks and setups for the cars to be fast enough to place well, you won't unlock anything. So I found a cheat online and now I can race whatever car I want at whatever track I want. I still suck, but it's better than being stuck with the Mini Cooper on some dinky track forever.
Falcon 4.0 was in the same situation, too. The recommendation was for a P2-450 and I was trying to run it originally on a K6-2 350 originally. I went up to a k6-2 550 and still that wasn't enough. I think my Athlon 1600 finally made it reasonably playable, but by then I had a family and no time to relearn it enough to play it well without getting blown out of the sky. But it is a cool game that probably gets as close to the real jet fighter combat as any other flight sim ever has.
I was wanting to mention the lack of flight sims presented in other posts, and I'm glad you've mentioned Falcon 3.0. My personal favorites from the good old days were Fleet Defender, an F-14 simulation and Janes F-15, an F-15E simulation. What made these flight sims unique was the simulation of the back seat position (RIO in F-14 and WSO in F-15 if I remember correctly). I would spend a lot of time during the flight into the target in the back seat planning what weapon to use and how to use it as well as keeping track of the current situation on the radar. Aerial refueling was also an interesting challenge in F-15 and one I usually tried to avoid if possible.
I know energy is damn expensive these days, but do you really need to adjust it that often? Do you think you'd really save enough to cover the cost of such a complex system by fine-tuning that precicely? Perhaps I'm misinterpreting your needs but if I were in your shoes, I'd go over my schedule and find some common points at which to set temperatures and leave it at that for the period of your known schedule, if that is possible. Just pick the programmable thermostat to fit those needs. I'd go nuts trying to fine tune a system as you're envisioning.
As for the garage, if you're not going to spend every day in there, I'd suggest a generic theremostat or even a power switch on the furnace. Just turn it on before you want to work in there. If you plan to heat it, you plan to insulate it, so it should heat pretty quickly.
Maybe it's just me (I'm just a geeky farmer), but I just don't see the point of a complex system.
I've read quite a few articles about this sort of alternative fuel in the farm publications I recieve, and I think it would be more difficult to get alternative heating going in urban areas due to the size of heating units (the ones I've seen pictures of are the size of a small shed or larger) and the infrastructure needed to deliver grass/wood/grain as a fuel source. But for those in rural areas where one often needs to get fuel hauled in anyway, why not? I have to get oil delivered to my farm for home heating anyway, so it's not a stretch to consider setting up a heater than can burn straw bales, or grain that these days seems almost worthless anyway.
While it's true that the only World Rally Championship event in North America is in Mexico, you can see rally events in the US with the SCCA Pro Rally series. If I remember correctly the past season saw the tragic death of a driver and co-driver from a Subaru team in this series.
I think on an episode of Windtunnel with Dave Despain someone said that the teams said they wanted to keep the current technology of gearboxes because it wasn't all that new and fancy anymore since it had been around for ten years already. Although I think it might be cool to see these guys trying to bang through the gears with an H-pattern shifter and a real foot clutch, I also believe it might not save much money for the smaller teams to have to redevelop a lot of parts to to fall in line with new rules.
It appears to me that this technology is not so much a new weapon as a new casing which can help direct the energy of the weapon. While I'm no expert no expert on this sort of thing I can't see it being more expensive than attaching a GPS guidance system on a bomb.
But on the topic of collateral damage, I think it became pretty obvious during WW2 that deliberately bombing non-military targets would not usually reduce the will of the people to resist, be it Britain, Germany or Japan.
Being a farmer who produces some grain, I've had a chance to talk to a few truckers who haul my grain. I recall one fellow saying he would normally get 1-2 miles per gallon loaded. He would probably be carrying about 30-35 tons of grain at the time with a three-axle bulk trailer pulled with a late-80s Freightliner with a 400 Cummins engine. Most truckers hauling grain are now running trucks pulling Super-B trailers, which would be two trailers (five axles plus the truck). I can't imagine the fuel economy being any better.
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I would be interested to know if the technology to boost bandwidth on copper might also help push bandwidth out further. A lot of us rural folk still don't have a lot of choices when it comes to broadband and all of them are expensive.
I've got two strikes against me before we can truly be free of subscription TV (BellTV satellite service). One, we're in Canada, so we lack much of the "Hulu-type" streaming options. Two, we're on a farm well away from decent bandwidth, stuck with satellite internet service. We do the best we can with torrents downloaded overnight (the FAP doesn't cut in in the middle of the night), Zip.ca DVD rental-by-mail and recently discovered there's quite a lot of true FTA content on the old C-band dish (using an Openbox S9 receiver) and have really gotten into watching the RTV affiliates that way. Emergency! and Magnum PI are far and away better viewing than Survivor and Dancing with the Stars!
So anyway, the BellTV subscription is just the minimum plus sports and threatening to quit made them give us a better rate for the next year.
I hope we don't find ourselves in a situation as we do with full-size computers where ads and sales-droids are telling us that SuperMultiCore Machine X is "perfect for email, web browsing and organizing your recipe collection". I don't want to see multicore phones trying to make up for sloppy coding and configuration.
Screw nature. I see enough trees and dirt every day. This kind of hike would be way more interesting!
I notice that most of your situations involve a semi at fault. I'd like to point out that more often than not it's the idiot in the four-wheeler who's at fault because he doesn't look before he tries to cross a highway and is plowed into by an innocent semi. Almost every fatality involving a semi around here comes from that situation. I'd be very impressed if Volvo can produce a car that allows anyone to survive that kind of "accident".
OK, but I don't think six billion people would fit in the Fertile Crescent.
Oh, wait...we had explorers that had the courage to take to the stormy seas in fragile craft without accurate navigation. Unmanned space missions are good for gathering information but there might come a time when we need to get out there to make use of what we learn whether it be for science or for commercial use.
It's really quite sad to see another step backward in human spaceflight. I grew up in the '80s when the shuttle was exciting but thought we'd have progressed beyond it by now. As a child a space station meant a large circular wheel with a central hub that thousands of people were living on and which was stepping off point for missions further out. Much as I appreciate the science going on with what we have, it sure would be nice if mankind was a little bolder.
The acronym or what it stands for? I always wondered that. Maybe companys and organizations have a whole team of people who's sole job is to brainstorm cool acronyms and then figure out words to fit.
Anyway, I still think this exercise would be cool to watch.
I'd love to tell you but first of all, are you from China or Iran?
It's my understanding subs tend to listen for what's out there because using one's own sonar would broadcast your own position to the enemy. If both these subs were running in this way I can see how a collision would occur. It's happened before and is bound to happen again.
I live on a farm in a very rural area of southern Saskatchewan, Canada. A year ago I heard a wireless provider (a private company) was lighting up a tower nearby so naturally I was pretty excited about getting a high speed internet connection finally. I'd been on dialup and didn't want to go the satellite route (for all the usual reasons). I'm about eight miles from the tower and could see the flashing light on top at night. Unfortunately I learned the antenna on the tower was installed only half-way up the tower...and at that height it was behind some hills...which means no line-of-sight! To rub it in even more our phone company called to sell us DSL by mistake and swore up and down that we could get it despite being seven miles from the nearest town.
So here I am on satellite and at times wish was still on dialup. $55/month for 512k sat. It would have been $45 for 1.5Mb wireless. Our phone company (SaskTel, a government-owned company) also operates wireless towers but despite one of their cell towers being about five miles away (and fully visible to me) they haven't yet put an internet transmitter on it. There's some hope they will in the not-to-distant future though.
Perhaps the economic crisis might push people and companies to search for less expensive options...like open source products.
Your reply mentioning a battle of wills and calves in wire reminded me of the trouble I've had with bulls. One year we had a Hereford bull run ahead of the herd to try and cut them off while we tried to roundup. No way was he going to let us take his girls! We finally gave up and rounded up a different herd. And twice in the past two years we've had a bull try to go over a fence to visit the neighbors' herd only to get stuck halfway because he couldn't get his back legs over. The first time I think he spent a couple of days there before I found him. The second I knew they'd been hanging around the fence so I was checking every day.
In a week our two I'll be rounding up to get rid of a couple of cows with murderous intentions...and that's a whole different challenge!
I work with cattle for a living, both my own and helping neighbors. I see it over and over. There are definitely leaders in a herd but there are also cattle that will not follow unless you get behind them and get them moving in the right direction. Maybe there's a slow one who stepped in a hole yesterday. Maybe the calf has picked that moment to get a snack and the mother stops for it to suck. Or it's the nervous cow that heads for the hills at the first sign of a roundup. Hell, there's even leader cows who decide to go different directions. Cattle like routine and if they don't usually go a certain direction they don't really feel like going there. Many times I've had a herd approach an open gate and stop. After a few minutes of trying to get them to go through they scatter. But often the first place they head when I start trying to round them up is where they go to drink water because it's what they do every day.
I hope this is just an idea for the smaller UPS trucks. A tractor-trailer driver would kill someone who forced him to make a right when he didn't have to. It might save a few insensitive clods in cars who try to scoot through on the right of a truck trying to make his wide right turn. We're even taught to swing right, then left, then right again to try to keep the rear of the trailer far enough right to cut down on that gap while still giving us room to get everything around the corner without curb-hopping while keeping the smaller four-wheelers safely out of that gap. So I've seen a saying somewhere that says "Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do." It's just easier that way for semi drivers.
I held out for the exact same reason, and of course signed up for the exaxt same reasons as you. I was so tired of having to get accounts for everything. Oh well, our ID numbers are still pretty low.
I have a family that needs my attention most of the time. I have a wife, a 3-1/2 year old boy and one-year-old twin boys so I rarely get a chance to play my games. Maybe I get to play once every week or two, usually not for more than an hour. I recently purchased GT Legends (a racing game) and found that most of it required unlocking. With my schedule of play by the time I unlocked all the cars and tracks...well, I actually probably would have given up before I got that far. If you don't get enough time to learn tracks and setups for the cars to be fast enough to place well, you won't unlock anything. So I found a cheat online and now I can race whatever car I want at whatever track I want. I still suck, but it's better than being stuck with the Mini Cooper on some dinky track forever.
Falcon 4.0 was in the same situation, too. The recommendation was for a P2-450 and I was trying to run it originally on a K6-2 350 originally. I went up to a k6-2 550 and still that wasn't enough. I think my Athlon 1600 finally made it reasonably playable, but by then I had a family and no time to relearn it enough to play it well without getting blown out of the sky. But it is a cool game that probably gets as close to the real jet fighter combat as any other flight sim ever has.
I was wanting to mention the lack of flight sims presented in other posts, and I'm glad you've mentioned Falcon 3.0. My personal favorites from the good old days were Fleet Defender, an F-14 simulation and Janes F-15, an F-15E simulation. What made these flight sims unique was the simulation of the back seat position (RIO in F-14 and WSO in F-15 if I remember correctly). I would spend a lot of time during the flight into the target in the back seat planning what weapon to use and how to use it as well as keeping track of the current situation on the radar. Aerial refueling was also an interesting challenge in F-15 and one I usually tried to avoid if possible.
I know energy is damn expensive these days, but do you really need to adjust it that often? Do you think you'd really save enough to cover the cost of such a complex system by fine-tuning that precicely? Perhaps I'm misinterpreting your needs but if I were in your shoes, I'd go over my schedule and find some common points at which to set temperatures and leave it at that for the period of your known schedule, if that is possible. Just pick the programmable thermostat to fit those needs. I'd go nuts trying to fine tune a system as you're envisioning.
As for the garage, if you're not going to spend every day in there, I'd suggest a generic theremostat or even a power switch on the furnace. Just turn it on before you want to work in there. If you plan to heat it, you plan to insulate it, so it should heat pretty quickly.
Maybe it's just me (I'm just a geeky farmer), but I just don't see the point of a complex system.
I've read quite a few articles about this sort of alternative fuel in the farm publications I recieve, and I think it would be more difficult to get alternative heating going in urban areas due to the size of heating units (the ones I've seen pictures of are the size of a small shed or larger) and the infrastructure needed to deliver grass/wood/grain as a fuel source. But for those in rural areas where one often needs to get fuel hauled in anyway, why not? I have to get oil delivered to my farm for home heating anyway, so it's not a stretch to consider setting up a heater than can burn straw bales, or grain that these days seems almost worthless anyway.
While it's true that the only World Rally Championship event in North America is in Mexico, you can see rally events in the US with the SCCA Pro Rally series. If I remember correctly the past season saw the tragic death of a driver and co-driver from a Subaru team in this series.
I think on an episode of Windtunnel with Dave Despain someone said that the teams said they wanted to keep the current technology of gearboxes because it wasn't all that new and fancy anymore since it had been around for ten years already. Although I think it might be cool to see these guys trying to bang through the gears with an H-pattern shifter and a real foot clutch, I also believe it might not save much money for the smaller teams to have to redevelop a lot of parts to to fall in line with new rules.
It appears to me that this technology is not so much a new weapon as a new casing which can help direct the energy of the weapon. While I'm no expert no expert on this sort of thing I can't see it being more expensive than attaching a GPS guidance system on a bomb.
But on the topic of collateral damage, I think it became pretty obvious during WW2 that deliberately bombing non-military targets would not usually reduce the will of the people to resist, be it Britain, Germany or Japan.
Being a farmer who produces some grain, I've had a chance to talk to a few truckers who haul my grain. I recall one fellow saying he would normally get 1-2 miles per gallon loaded. He would probably be carrying about 30-35 tons of grain at the time with a three-axle bulk trailer pulled with a late-80s Freightliner with a 400 Cummins engine. Most truckers hauling grain are now running trucks pulling Super-B trailers, which would be two trailers (five axles plus the truck). I can't imagine the fuel economy being any better.