There's tons of money to be made in the audiophile market. Just apply a little creativity along with some technobabble, then price it higher than anybody else. It won't be long before forum posts start praising your products as producing "warmer" sound.
Some of my favorites:
Crygenically frozen cables; basically, dip the cables in liquid nitrogen (which you can get surprisingly easy and cheap), let them thaw, and charge $1000
Cable burn-in service; put a sine wave through a cable for a week and only charge $500. For those poor audiophiles who can't afford the cryo treatment. Package deal with cryo treatment for only $1300. Sawtooth waves are an extra $200, or $100 with cryo package. Send your cables back once a year for re-treatment for only $150 per go ($180 for sawtooth waves).
Wood block that has been "resonance treated" by sitting under an amp playing classical music for a month, which they then put under their own amp.
Claim you have a technology which can improve their sound setup over the phone. Basically, you're charging $100 for the service of processing their credit card.
I've tried for years to tell these people that these companies are a big scam, but audiophiles are a daft group. I'm about ready to give up the argument and run a scam myself. Someone is making a fortune off them, and it might as well be me.
In order to "pump" the heat it has to use something like freon, a compressor, electricity, etc.
Strictly speaking, an AC compressor doesn't need electricity. You need something that can spin up the compressor, which could theoretically be a monkey on a bicycle. AC compressors on a car run directly off the engine. Refrigerators and home AC units need electricity to run an electric motor, which then turns the compressor.
Are you sure you meant to reply to my post? Small European cars aren't particularly exotic and are often cheaper than the average American car (in terms of percentage of income). They may well be less safe in a crash, but the right way to fix that is to reduce the number of crashes.
Most of the 3-wheelers being developed are stable. They're not the one-tire-in-front configuration that was in 3-wheeler ATVs years ago (which are banned). Two-wheels-in-front is reasonably stable, though a RWD configuration would have problems getting power to the ground with only one tire. A one-in-front config is also easier on the aerodynamics.
Or better yet, teach people not to be idiots while driving. All these safety systems are making cars heavier, but with less benefit than if people just drove safer.
I doubt this microcar will even be sold in the US (except as a grey market import) due to safety regulations. European safety regulation is more lax, thereby getting lighter cars with smaller engines with similar performance. Engines around 1.0 - 1.5L are common in Europe, but in the US only a handful of car engines are smaller than 2.0L.
Heavy metals can be addressed by a simple carbon filter, which isn't going to add anything to the water except maybe some extra carbon. Perchlorate needs a reverse osmosis setup, which is more complicated, but it shouldn't add much to the water, either.
I found that if you waited a week or two to buy the book, you could usually figure out if buying the book was actually necessary or not. For a good chunk of my courses, the teacher's lectures were either straight out of the book (saving me on both study time and the cost of the book) or the book wasn't used at all.
For the remainder, sometimes the school library has a reasonably up-to-date copy. That works well enough for humanities courses that don't have exercises to be rearranged every year the way math or science courses do. Then you can buy the books for the remaining 10% of the courses.
Occasionally, a kind professor helps out. I had one who said "we're required to tell you that you have to buy the book. That said, I'm never going to ask you to open it, although I'm not allowed to tell you that". Right!
The thing is, increased CO2 (if that was the only factor in climate change) is probably an overall boon to the biosphere. It would mean more tropical regions and more usable land in far northern latitudes. The main problem is in its effect on human society, not the biosphere as a whole.
However, CO2 isn't the only effect humans are causing that drives climate change. Desertification is largely driven by bad farming practices (like fertilizer runoff and overgrazing). So sloppy farming is stopping regions from becoming more tropical at a time when CO2 is increasing.
I'm becoming convinced that hydroponics with vertical farming is going to be the only sustainable food source in the not too distant future. It solves fertilizer runoff problems, doesn't need a large 2D land plot, and is less susceptible to climate change. Since you also need less fertilizer overall, it also requires less fossil fuel to make and transport that fertilizer. You get both less environmental impact and more robust infrastructure in one package.
That was one particularly bad portion of the IPCC report. Mosquitoes carrying malaria tend to be contained by the fact that they contract the disease themselves as well as anyone they bite. Therefore, they tend not to be very competitive with other mosquito species. If given the chance, they can thrive in much colder climates. Malaria outbreaks were reported in Canada back in 1929, though most modern cases are imported by people traveling out of country.
This particular point has been a source of criticism for the recent IPCC reports as a political document rather than a scientific one. Previous reports stated that it's unlikely that malaria would spread northward.
No matter what the cause, the increased global temperature is a bad thing for us and thus it is in our best interest to stop contributing to the change ASAP.
I disagree. Drastic changes to Earth's climate have happened before without human influence, such as large meteor strikes. No matter if humans are causing this change or not, we need to deal with the fact that the biosphere changes. The right response, therefore, is to make our infrastructure more resilient.
AI is a Holy Grail. In other words, something we'll probably never get, but we'll create a whole bunch of useful stuff while trying to attain it. "AI" is just a stated goal that gets a bunch of smart people together to develop tools towards that goal. AI research has already given us Lisp and Virtual Machines and Timesharing/Multitasking and the Internet and a bunch of useful data structures and algorithms.
At some point after all that, a computer was developed that can play Grandmaster-level chess, but this was not a necessary development to justify the all research grants.
Let's get real here. If an ISP was really selling you a guaranteed dedicated bandwidth you would be paying a much higher price than you do now.
I do pay the higher price. I have a business-class cable modem exactly because I don't want to be subject to the malarkey that residential service has. And it's a lot cheaper than a T1 for the same downstream bandwidth (and acceptable upstream).
If people are using these sorts of applications when the network is heavily loaded it seems to me quite reasonable that traffic based on interactive applications (VOIP, video, HTTP) should receive priority. ANY good computing system should favor interactive applications over non-interactive applications. It is a basic system design principle.
The problem is that I don't trust my ISP to do that. I trust me to do that by setting up QoS on my own equipment, if I so choose.
The telecom industry should have had most of the urban US on 10Mb connections years ago. Instead, they've spent most of their efforts reconsolidating themselves back into MaBell. With the kind of infrastructure upgrades that taxpayers have already paid for, there'd be no need for the entire network neutrality debate.
All over ISPs' advertisements. Unless they've redefined the word "unlimited".
An Internet which is not neutral is less useful than an Internet that is. If web browsing is sped up at the expense of streaming video, that's going to hurt some people more than others. If streaming video is sped up at the expense of games, a whole other group is affected. Since people come up with new ways of using the Internet all the time, and we can't predict new uses, the best strategy is to give all packets equal measure.
Rather than throwing out Net Neutrality, it'd be more productive for ISPs to find business models that don't involve overcommitment, or at least make it less painful. Like some of the recent attempts to make P2P software favor nodes within the same ISP.
I know the above is meant as a (seriously overused) joke, but it did get me thinking. If there was previously liquid water on Mars, and carbon-based life developed roughly along the same lines as on Earth, and internal geothermal processes are similar, than it's conceivable that there is oil, too. Although that's an awful lot of "if's". Also, if we were capable of getting oil off Mars economically, we also wouldn't need oil for energy.
EXAMPLES: [Key process] calculation -- the core of BigFirm's business and profits -- was being (and may still be) done incorrectly in FUBAR; it had never been previously checked for correctness through all these years. Likewise, performance expectations have been based on the presumption of FUBAR distributed over multiple systems, processors, and threads, yet no one ever tested to see if those implementations would work until recently -- and they didn't. The build environment needs to be overhauled. The defect tracking process is poor, particularly the practice of writing up defects not against the current release but the release in which the defect is scheduled to be fixed -- so as to keep the number of defects down for the current release.
RISKS: BigFirm leaves itself open to potential liabilities, not to mention crippling its own core business. In the meantime, the effort to transition directly into the Rational Unified Process (RUP) is not being given sufficient time and will likely grind development to a halt.
To summarize, the project in question was in an area considered this company's main focus, and that a lack of correctness in the software could open them up to liabilities. I'm guessing some kind of accounting, legal, or health industry software.
I doubt it in this particular case. One of the points in the memo was that the problem wasn't complex, but the solution was. Someone needed to step back in the beginning and say that they could throw all this stuff away. Maybe that person would be a Project Manager, but it could just as easily be a developer that is heard loud enough.
Not quite. The idea is to squirt atomized water into the intake, which will vaporize when it's heated during the compression stroke. Since vaporization will absorb energy, it helps cools the compressed fuel/air mixture, thus preventing predetonation. Mixing meth in with the water improves it further. It's even better if you can directly inject the water/meth mixture during the compression stroke, but that requires engine design changes. Injecting into the intake can be done on almost any car.
The net effect is like running higher octane gas, allowing you to run higher boost or compression. I've heard quotes of around +20 octane equivalent with intake injection.
If oil doesn't give us a net energy surplus after taking into account drilling and transportation, then where is the energy coming from that makes up the loss? Further, if this energy source exists, why wouldn't we be using it to power our cars instead of wasting time with oil?
I largely agree, except that it isn't just blogs who are guilty of this regurgitation. All the regular newspapers repost the same AP wire story, too, cluttering up google search results just as much as blogs.
Why do wire services still exist? Are we still pretending we get our news from separate sources?
Slashdot Mirror
There's tons of money to be made in the audiophile market. Just apply a little creativity along with some technobabble, then price it higher than anybody else. It won't be long before forum posts start praising your products as producing "warmer" sound.
Some of my favorites:
I've tried for years to tell these people that these companies are a big scam, but audiophiles are a daft group. I'm about ready to give up the argument and run a scam myself. Someone is making a fortune off them, and it might as well be me.
In order to "pump" the heat it has to use something like freon, a compressor, electricity, etc.
Strictly speaking, an AC compressor doesn't need electricity. You need something that can spin up the compressor, which could theoretically be a monkey on a bicycle. AC compressors on a car run directly off the engine. Refrigerators and home AC units need electricity to run an electric motor, which then turns the compressor.
Are you sure you meant to reply to my post? Small European cars aren't particularly exotic and are often cheaper than the average American car (in terms of percentage of income). They may well be less safe in a crash, but the right way to fix that is to reduce the number of crashes.
Most of the 3-wheelers being developed are stable. They're not the one-tire-in-front configuration that was in 3-wheeler ATVs years ago (which are banned). Two-wheels-in-front is reasonably stable, though a RWD configuration would have problems getting power to the ground with only one tire. A one-in-front config is also easier on the aerodynamics.
Or better yet, teach people not to be idiots while driving. All these safety systems are making cars heavier, but with less benefit than if people just drove safer.
I doubt this microcar will even be sold in the US (except as a grey market import) due to safety regulations. European safety regulation is more lax, thereby getting lighter cars with smaller engines with similar performance. Engines around 1.0 - 1.5L are common in Europe, but in the US only a handful of car engines are smaller than 2.0L.
Heavy metals can be addressed by a simple carbon filter, which isn't going to add anything to the water except maybe some extra carbon. Perchlorate needs a reverse osmosis setup, which is more complicated, but it shouldn't add much to the water, either.
I'm glad you're not President.
I found that if you waited a week or two to buy the book, you could usually figure out if buying the book was actually necessary or not. For a good chunk of my courses, the teacher's lectures were either straight out of the book (saving me on both study time and the cost of the book) or the book wasn't used at all.
For the remainder, sometimes the school library has a reasonably up-to-date copy. That works well enough for humanities courses that don't have exercises to be rearranged every year the way math or science courses do. Then you can buy the books for the remaining 10% of the courses.
Occasionally, a kind professor helps out. I had one who said "we're required to tell you that you have to buy the book. That said, I'm never going to ask you to open it, although I'm not allowed to tell you that". Right!
The thing is, increased CO2 (if that was the only factor in climate change) is probably an overall boon to the biosphere. It would mean more tropical regions and more usable land in far northern latitudes. The main problem is in its effect on human society, not the biosphere as a whole.
However, CO2 isn't the only effect humans are causing that drives climate change. Desertification is largely driven by bad farming practices (like fertilizer runoff and overgrazing). So sloppy farming is stopping regions from becoming more tropical at a time when CO2 is increasing.
I'm becoming convinced that hydroponics with vertical farming is going to be the only sustainable food source in the not too distant future. It solves fertilizer runoff problems, doesn't need a large 2D land plot, and is less susceptible to climate change. Since you also need less fertilizer overall, it also requires less fossil fuel to make and transport that fertilizer. You get both less environmental impact and more robust infrastructure in one package.
That was one particularly bad portion of the IPCC report. Mosquitoes carrying malaria tend to be contained by the fact that they contract the disease themselves as well as anyone they bite. Therefore, they tend not to be very competitive with other mosquito species. If given the chance, they can thrive in much colder climates. Malaria outbreaks were reported in Canada back in 1929, though most modern cases are imported by people traveling out of country.
This particular point has been a source of criticism for the recent IPCC reports as a political document rather than a scientific one. Previous reports stated that it's unlikely that malaria would spread northward.
Alternatively:
No matter what the cause, the increased global temperature is a bad thing for us and thus it is in our best interest to stop contributing to the change ASAP.
I disagree. Drastic changes to Earth's climate have happened before without human influence, such as large meteor strikes. No matter if humans are causing this change or not, we need to deal with the fact that the biosphere changes. The right response, therefore, is to make our infrastructure more resilient.
Learning from watergate means they'll be more careful about getting caught. Such as making sure there are no tapes that inconveniently crop up.
AI is a Holy Grail. In other words, something we'll probably never get, but we'll create a whole bunch of useful stuff while trying to attain it. "AI" is just a stated goal that gets a bunch of smart people together to develop tools towards that goal. AI research has already given us Lisp and Virtual Machines and Timesharing/Multitasking and the Internet and a bunch of useful data structures and algorithms.
At some point after all that, a computer was developed that can play Grandmaster-level chess, but this was not a necessary development to justify the all research grants.
Let's get real here. If an ISP was really selling you a guaranteed dedicated bandwidth you would be paying a much higher price than you do now.
I do pay the higher price. I have a business-class cable modem exactly because I don't want to be subject to the malarkey that residential service has. And it's a lot cheaper than a T1 for the same downstream bandwidth (and acceptable upstream).
If people are using these sorts of applications when the network is heavily loaded it seems to me quite reasonable that traffic based on interactive applications (VOIP, video, HTTP) should receive priority. ANY good computing system should favor interactive applications over non-interactive applications. It is a basic system design principle.
The problem is that I don't trust my ISP to do that. I trust me to do that by setting up QoS on my own equipment, if I so choose.
The telecom industry should have had most of the urban US on 10Mb connections years ago. Instead, they've spent most of their efforts reconsolidating themselves back into MaBell. With the kind of infrastructure upgrades that taxpayers have already paid for, there'd be no need for the entire network neutrality debate.
Where is it written that it is all-you-can-eat?
All over ISPs' advertisements. Unless they've redefined the word "unlimited".
An Internet which is not neutral is less useful than an Internet that is. If web browsing is sped up at the expense of streaming video, that's going to hurt some people more than others. If streaming video is sped up at the expense of games, a whole other group is affected. Since people come up with new ways of using the Internet all the time, and we can't predict new uses, the best strategy is to give all packets equal measure.
Rather than throwing out Net Neutrality, it'd be more productive for ISPs to find business models that don't involve overcommitment, or at least make it less painful. Like some of the recent attempts to make P2P software favor nodes within the same ISP.
I know the above is meant as a (seriously overused) joke, but it did get me thinking. If there was previously liquid water on Mars, and carbon-based life developed roughly along the same lines as on Earth, and internal geothermal processes are similar, than it's conceivable that there is oil, too. Although that's an awful lot of "if's". Also, if we were capable of getting oil off Mars economically, we also wouldn't need oil for energy.
The most revealing quotes are this one:
EXAMPLES: [Key process] calculation -- the core of BigFirm's business and profits -- was being (and may still be) done incorrectly in FUBAR; it had never been previously checked for correctness through all these years. Likewise, performance expectations have been based on the presumption of FUBAR distributed over multiple systems, processors, and threads, yet no one ever tested to see if those implementations would work until recently -- and they didn't. The build environment needs to be overhauled. The defect tracking process is poor, particularly the practice of writing up defects not against the current release but the release in which the defect is scheduled to be fixed -- so as to keep the number of defects down for the current release.
RISKS: BigFirm leaves itself open to potential liabilities, not to mention crippling its own core business. In the meantime, the effort to transition directly into the Rational Unified Process (RUP) is not being given sufficient time and will likely grind development to a halt.
To summarize, the project in question was in an area considered this company's main focus, and that a lack of correctness in the software could open them up to liabilities. I'm guessing some kind of accounting, legal, or health industry software.
I doubt it in this particular case. One of the points in the memo was that the problem wasn't complex, but the solution was. Someone needed to step back in the beginning and say that they could throw all this stuff away. Maybe that person would be a Project Manager, but it could just as easily be a developer that is heard loud enough.
There's an explicit exception for the mini-notebook market, for the very reason that Microsoft is afraid that Linux will sweep it.
Do you also complain when people ask for a Kleenex?
Not quite. The idea is to squirt atomized water into the intake, which will vaporize when it's heated during the compression stroke. Since vaporization will absorb energy, it helps cools the compressed fuel/air mixture, thus preventing predetonation. Mixing meth in with the water improves it further. It's even better if you can directly inject the water/meth mixture during the compression stroke, but that requires engine design changes. Injecting into the intake can be done on almost any car.
The net effect is like running higher octane gas, allowing you to run higher boost or compression. I've heard quotes of around +20 octane equivalent with intake injection.
If oil doesn't give us a net energy surplus after taking into account drilling and transportation, then where is the energy coming from that makes up the loss? Further, if this energy source exists, why wouldn't we be using it to power our cars instead of wasting time with oil?
But aren't you worried about getting cancer from holding a magnet up to your head?
Or possibly cure cancer. Depending on who you ask.
I largely agree, except that it isn't just blogs who are guilty of this regurgitation. All the regular newspapers repost the same AP wire story, too, cluttering up google search results just as much as blogs.
Why do wire services still exist? Are we still pretending we get our news from separate sources?