"If you know of an under $300 and under 25 inch TV (including the digital tuner built-in), please reply. CRT or LCD is OK. I quit looking last summer. The search was a waste of time."
At that pricepoint it sounds like you're looking for a low resolution TV with a digital tuner. I would expect to see these the day after the FCC actually shuts off analog NTSC broadcasts to go all digital. There's no hurry to buy this now. They keep saying that day is coming, but the manufacterers are dragging their feet.
The closest I've seen is the Samsung TX-P2775H, a 27" CRT with HDTV tuner for $600. It's the same price as an HDTV monitor w/o tuner.
If this scenario were to play out, I doubt they'd bother trucking it inland. It would be much, much easier to put it in a shipping container and detonate it in the harbor. The feds are aware of this scenario, and they are working to secure the ports, but they're not spending nearly enough.
IMO, this is a low probability scenario because fission nukes are still hard to obtain, and there are still plenty of low-tech ways to cause mayhem. I'm worried more about the 4 liquified natural gas (LNG) tanker offloading stations in the U.S. Worse case scenario is a total spill resulting in a suffocating gas cloud drifting onto the city killing tens of thousands. And theseclowns want to build more of them off the coast of Boston and southern California.
"If I want to take a 400-level Philosophy class during my engineering education, and do poorly in it, why should this affect my GPA that my future employers see, when this class has nothing to do with my engineering ability?"
My university let us take up to 4 classes outside our major pass/fail. That's probably the best solution to your complaint. Don't most engineering programs have some requirement for humanities and social science classes anyway?
Thanks for pointing out Wal*Mart. Everybody needs to read this about Costco vs. Wal*Mart which owns Sam's Club. The problem isn't unions. It's companies that treat their employees like shit, who are coincidentally also companies who like to bust up unions. Treat people like shit and you'll get shitty workers who hate their jobs. I like shopping at Costco knowing they treat their employees well, and the staff seems to have a better attitude than most retail places, not the fake friendliness and politeness you see in most stores, the genuine friendliness you see from people who *don't hate their jobs*.
Some of us don't have a choice in mail clients at work. Until they upgraded to Outlook 2003, the only way to disable external images in Outlook was to disable images in Internet Explorer. At a time when Mozilla/Firefox were less mature and more sites were IE only, that was a major annoyance, although less of an annoyance than loading images from spam.
"you would be using fossil fuels initially to produce it, but would you always?"
If you're talking about electrolysis, forget about it unless you have an endless supply of free electricity. Hydrogen from electrolysis makes a very inefficient storage battery. Now if you ARE assuming free electricity (from fusion maybe?) then I say go ahead and build your hydrogen highway.
"I don't mean to sond cynical, but there is not a whole lot that has to do with science and technology that would excite most students."
You're probably right. Everybody needs to read Paul Graham's essay on Nerds and Popularity right now. I like to think of it as a smarter version of Jon Katz's rants about the high school hellmouth.
I have no idea what to do for a science fair, but to the wider question of what interests high school students and what parents could do about it, I'd say racing, like motocross and go-karts. I think a lot of discipline problems at that age like failing classes and petty crime come from being bored. Classes are boring. The suburbs are boring. Give them something fun on which to focus their energy and find their talents. You could say the same about all sports, but with dirt bikes are more technical and you could them interesting in mechanical engineering or something similar.
Sure, you could show up late to miss the commercials, but how do you know if this time it's 25 minutes of commercials or 15 minutes of commercials? Plus you'll probably end up with a crappy seat like the front corner. You just have to know your priorities. To me, it's not that important to see a movie the first week it's out. I can wait a month or two to see it in the $3 theater or wait a few months more than that for the rental. The $3 theater isn't the place to impress a date, but it's a good value. They show 3 trailers then straight to the movie.
Schumacher couldn't beat Hakkinen for the championship when the Ferrari was the slower car. Although it was impressive when he won the championships in the less powerful Benetton Ford V8.
The MotoGP bikes put on a great show, but compared to F1 the machines are simpler and the engineering budgets are smaller. Motorcycle racer Eddie Lawson probably put it best when he said,
"The truth about racing cars is that if a competent driver is in a great car, he will win. Yet a great driver in a bad car has no chance. On motorcycles, maybe a good rider on a bad bike won't win, but he definitely has a chance. In cars, you have no chance without the best machinery." (Interview is in the Dec '04 Motorcyclist mag. Not online yet.)
I guarantee you HP isn't paying $200 for Windows XP. $200 is the price of full retail copy of Windows XP Home. They're paying less than $100 for an OEM license, probably much less. Still a significant chunk of change out of a $600 computer considering how much hardware gets better, faster and cheaper all the time, but not $200 worth.
There are already huge economies of scale in the basic technology of PV. The silicon wafers for solar cells and computer chips are basically the same. And we know how many billions are spent on process improvements for chip fabs. Satellites also demand the most efficient high grade solar cells at whatever the cost. So there's a huge incentive to fund basic R&D just for the satellite market. Mass production on a wide scale would demand cheaper (and cleaner) technology, so I agree there are improvements to be had there, especially with cleaner. Growing silicon wafers is nasty business, probably not as nasty as fossil fuel energy, but nasty all the same. If you want to harvest the sun at the cost of less efficiency per area, the greenest way I can think of now is with biodiesel made from algae or vegetable oil like soybeans. Something like 60-70% of U.S. farmland is used to grow livestock feed. Cut back on the beef consumption a bit and that's a lot of spare capacity to feed a hungry world or feed the fuel pump.
Even with fusion power "too cheap to meter" there will still be limited resources. Trust me, there is no government of a developed nation on earth that doesn't want the incredible economic boost free power will have.
Exactly right. As another poster said, fusion scales up not down. To be cost-effective, a fusion plant using currently known science needs to be huge. That implies huge levels of investment, labor and organizational structure. Think Hoover Dam, not rooftop solar. Not something a small country with no technological infrastructure can throw together. There are other low-tech energy sources that could democratize energy (I'm thinking algae ponds for biodiesel), but they can't match the energy density of fusion or even fossils.
Doesn't work. One of my domains gets a lot of spam to nonexistent addresses because it's a typo of an ISP. They used to bounce off the internal server. Now I have the SMTP gateway rejecting them with Error 550 Unknown User. The spammers keep hammering away at the same addresses.
If someone were ripping a movie to a smaller, low res file, it would make more sense to use the DVD as the source instead of the HD-DVD. The big reason for the 50GB capacity is to store video at some insanely high resolution like 1800x1080. By the time DVD's are retired I'm thinking your average PC power user won't blink at 100GB.
The difference is in the US I can write a fictional story about the Confederacy winning the Civil War or draw a fictional map showing the Confederacy as an independant country.
This store was pretty blatant about it. Selling a $500 "Super Xbox" preinstalled with a modchip, upgraded hard drive and a few copied games on the hard drive. That's just asking for it.
WTF does PC and sensitivity have to do with this? China is a dictatorship and bans anything that shows Taiwan as its own country, things like maps, books and now games. Taiwan is in a sort of diplomatic limbo as far as the status of their statehood, but they do have a de-facto autonomous government.
OK, maybe you can get a few free to air feeds with a big dish and a C/Ku band receiver, but to me that sounds like as much fun as tuning a shortwave radio. Most people don't have or want a big dish. So for practical purposes this doesn't work in the U.S. meaning it won't work with your cable, DTV/Echostar small dish, or your local stations off the rabbit ears antenna.
Apparently not many, even in a technical field like IT. How many of the people around the office could do calculus or even algebra? I'd have to dust off the calculus textbook myself if I had to do a problem.
"Or are we all supposed to be calculus wizards for those high-end math-related jobs that don't exist?"
Good question. The implication of this article is that poor math skills are hurting U.S. competitiveness in the global economy. That is true from a quantity standpoint. From a quality standpoint we may not be doing so badly. There's no shortage of applicants to our top universities at least at the undergraduate level. It only takes a few genius level minds to come up with a new innovative idea that could launch new companies or even new industries. Where I do see a problem is in graduate students. Something like half of all science and engineering grad students are foreign nationals. Now as long as the U.S. can attract the best foreign students with the top universities and a friendly environment (meaning cities with a progressive, cosmopolitan attitude), I think we'll still be okay. Then again Bush is doing his best to piss off student visa holders in the War on Terror. Have you noticed the most stable IT and engineering employment is with defense contractors who can't hire non-U.S. citizens for the job? I do worry about our ability to compete with the world. If we retreat to only these heavily protected industries we'll definitely have a problem competing then.
Yes, this project is only for Europe because DVB is the European broadcast HDTV standard. The U.S. standard is ATSC. If you want an internal HDTV tuner card for the U.S. ATI makes the HDTV Wonder, but it has bad reviews. Also, DVB and ATSC are broadcast standards. These tuners won't work with cable or satellite.
Don't count out Europe either. All the European mutual funds have run up 15-20% since the summer while the Euro exchange rate has only been up 10%. Are investors getting nervous about the U.S. economy?
What's scary is that this guy honestly believes that total transparency makes for a better, more civil, society. Well I say let him put up or shut up. Try buying a full profile on Jay Patel, founder of Akiba. You think they'll sell it to you? The classic question here is who watches the watchers? If the watchers submit to the same public scrutiny as the database subjects, it's somewhat less of a problem than if the watchers reserved privacy for themselves.
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"If you know of an under $300 and under 25 inch TV (including the digital tuner built-in), please reply. CRT or LCD is OK. I quit looking last summer. The search was a waste of time."
At that pricepoint it sounds like you're looking for a low resolution TV with a digital tuner. I would expect to see these the day after the FCC actually shuts off analog NTSC broadcasts to go all digital. There's no hurry to buy this now. They keep saying that day is coming, but the manufacterers are dragging their feet.
The closest I've seen is the Samsung TX-P2775H, a 27" CRT with HDTV tuner for $600. It's the same price as an HDTV monitor w/o tuner.
If this scenario were to play out, I doubt they'd bother trucking it inland. It would be much, much easier to put it in a shipping container and detonate it in the harbor. The feds are aware of this scenario, and they are working to secure the ports, but they're not spending nearly enough.
IMO, this is a low probability scenario because fission nukes are still hard to obtain, and there are still plenty of low-tech ways to cause mayhem. I'm worried more about the 4 liquified natural gas (LNG) tanker offloading stations in the U.S. Worse case scenario is a total spill resulting in a suffocating gas cloud drifting onto the city killing tens of thousands. And these clowns want to build more of them off the coast of Boston and southern California.
"If I want to take a 400-level Philosophy class during my engineering education, and do poorly in it, why should this affect my GPA that my future employers see, when this class has nothing to do with my engineering ability?"
My university let us take up to 4 classes outside our major pass/fail. That's probably the best solution to your complaint. Don't most engineering programs have some requirement for humanities and social science classes anyway?
Thanks for pointing out Wal*Mart. Everybody needs to read this about Costco vs. Wal*Mart which owns Sam's Club. The problem isn't unions. It's companies that treat their employees like shit, who are coincidentally also companies who like to bust up unions. Treat people like shit and you'll get shitty workers who hate their jobs. I like shopping at Costco knowing they treat their employees well, and the staff seems to have a better attitude than most retail places, not the fake friendliness and politeness you see in most stores, the genuine friendliness you see from people who *don't hate their jobs*.
Some of us don't have a choice in mail clients at work. Until they upgraded to Outlook 2003, the only way to disable external images in Outlook was to disable images in Internet Explorer. At a time when Mozilla/Firefox were less mature and more sites were IE only, that was a major annoyance, although less of an annoyance than loading images from spam.
"you would be using fossil fuels initially to produce it, but would you always?"
If you're talking about electrolysis, forget about it unless you have an endless supply of free electricity. Hydrogen from electrolysis makes a very inefficient storage battery. Now if you ARE assuming free electricity (from fusion maybe?) then I say go ahead and build your hydrogen highway.
"I don't mean to sond cynical, but there is not a whole lot that has to do with science and technology that would excite most students."
You're probably right. Everybody needs to read Paul Graham's essay on Nerds and Popularity right now. I like to think of it as a smarter version of Jon Katz's rants about the high school hellmouth.
I have no idea what to do for a science fair, but to the wider question of what interests high school students and what parents could do about it, I'd say racing, like motocross and go-karts. I think a lot of discipline problems at that age like failing classes and petty crime come from being bored. Classes are boring. The suburbs are boring. Give them something fun on which to focus their energy and find their talents. You could say the same about all sports, but with dirt bikes are more technical and you could them interesting in mechanical engineering or something similar.
Sure, you could show up late to miss the commercials, but how do you know if this time it's 25 minutes of commercials or 15 minutes of commercials? Plus you'll probably end up with a crappy seat like the front corner. You just have to know your priorities. To me, it's not that important to see a movie the first week it's out. I can wait a month or two to see it in the $3 theater or wait a few months more than that for the rental. The $3 theater isn't the place to impress a date, but it's a good value. They show 3 trailers then straight to the movie.
Schumacher couldn't beat Hakkinen for the championship when the Ferrari was the slower car. Although it was impressive when he won the championships in the less powerful Benetton Ford V8.
The MotoGP bikes put on a great show, but compared to F1 the machines are simpler and the engineering budgets are smaller. Motorcycle racer Eddie Lawson probably put it best when he said,
"The truth about racing cars is that if a competent driver is in a great car, he will win. Yet a great driver in a bad car has no chance. On motorcycles, maybe a good rider on a bad bike won't win, but he definitely has a chance. In cars, you have no chance without the best machinery." (Interview is in the Dec '04 Motorcyclist mag. Not online yet.)
Does that sound like F1?
Why stop at that? A mob like that would probably put their heads on a stake outside as a warning to others who would dare write more spyware.
I guarantee you HP isn't paying $200 for Windows XP. $200 is the price of full retail copy of Windows XP Home. They're paying less than $100 for an OEM license, probably much less. Still a significant chunk of change out of a $600 computer considering how much hardware gets better, faster and cheaper all the time, but not $200 worth.
I know we grow enough for for today's 6 billion people. I meant for a hypothetical future with many more billions of people.
There are already huge economies of scale in the basic technology of PV. The silicon wafers for solar cells and computer chips are basically the same. And we know how many billions are spent on process improvements for chip fabs. Satellites also demand the most efficient high grade solar cells at whatever the cost. So there's a huge incentive to fund basic R&D just for the satellite market. Mass production on a wide scale would demand cheaper (and cleaner) technology, so I agree there are improvements to be had there, especially with cleaner. Growing silicon wafers is nasty business, probably not as nasty as fossil fuel energy, but nasty all the same. If you want to harvest the sun at the cost of less efficiency per area, the greenest way I can think of now is with biodiesel made from algae or vegetable oil like soybeans. Something like 60-70% of U.S. farmland is used to grow livestock feed. Cut back on the beef consumption a bit and that's a lot of spare capacity to feed a hungry world or feed the fuel pump.
Even with fusion power "too cheap to meter" there will still be limited resources. Trust me, there is no government of a developed nation on earth that doesn't want the incredible economic boost free power will have.
Exactly right. As another poster said, fusion scales up not down. To be cost-effective, a fusion plant using currently known science needs to be huge. That implies huge levels of investment, labor and organizational structure. Think Hoover Dam, not rooftop solar. Not something a small country with no technological infrastructure can throw together. There are other low-tech energy sources that could democratize energy (I'm thinking algae ponds for biodiesel), but they can't match the energy density of fusion or even fossils.
Doesn't work. One of my domains gets a lot of spam to nonexistent addresses because it's a typo of an ISP. They used to bounce off the internal server. Now I have the SMTP gateway rejecting them with Error 550 Unknown User. The spammers keep hammering away at the same addresses.
If someone were ripping a movie to a smaller, low res file, it would make more sense to use the DVD as the source instead of the HD-DVD. The big reason for the 50GB capacity is to store video at some insanely high resolution like 1800x1080. By the time DVD's are retired I'm thinking your average PC power user won't blink at 100GB.
The difference is in the US I can write a fictional story about the Confederacy winning the Civil War or draw a fictional map showing the Confederacy as an independant country.
This store was pretty blatant about it. Selling a $500 "Super Xbox" preinstalled with a modchip, upgraded hard drive and a few copied games on the hard drive. That's just asking for it.
WTF does PC and sensitivity have to do with this? China is a dictatorship and bans anything that shows Taiwan as its own country, things like maps, books and now games. Taiwan is in a sort of diplomatic limbo as far as the status of their statehood, but they do have a de-facto autonomous government.
OK, maybe you can get a few free to air feeds with a big dish and a C/Ku band receiver, but to me that sounds like as much fun as tuning a shortwave radio. Most people don't have or want a big dish. So for practical purposes this doesn't work in the U.S. meaning it won't work with your cable, DTV/Echostar small dish, or your local stations off the rabbit ears antenna.
"Who needs math?"
Apparently not many, even in a technical field like IT. How many of the people around the office could do calculus or even algebra? I'd have to dust off the calculus textbook myself if I had to do a problem.
"Or are we all supposed to be calculus wizards for those high-end math-related jobs that don't exist?"
Good question. The implication of this article is that poor math skills are hurting U.S. competitiveness in the global economy. That is true from a quantity standpoint. From a quality standpoint we may not be doing so badly. There's no shortage of applicants to our top universities at least at the undergraduate level. It only takes a few genius level minds to come up with a new innovative idea that could launch new companies or even new industries. Where I do see a problem is in graduate students. Something like half of all science and engineering grad students are foreign nationals. Now as long as the U.S. can attract the best foreign students with the top universities and a friendly environment (meaning cities with a progressive, cosmopolitan attitude), I think we'll still be okay. Then again Bush is doing his best to piss off student visa holders in the War on Terror. Have you noticed the most stable IT and engineering employment is with defense contractors who can't hire non-U.S. citizens for the job? I do worry about our ability to compete with the world. If we retreat to only these heavily protected industries we'll definitely have a problem competing then.
Yes, this project is only for Europe because DVB is the European broadcast HDTV standard. The U.S. standard is ATSC. If you want an internal HDTV tuner card for the U.S. ATI makes the HDTV Wonder, but it has bad reviews. Also, DVB and ATSC are broadcast standards. These tuners won't work with cable or satellite.
Don't count out Europe either. All the European mutual funds have run up 15-20% since the summer while the Euro exchange rate has only been up 10%. Are investors getting nervous about the U.S. economy?
What's scary is that this guy honestly believes that total transparency makes for a better, more civil, society. Well I say let him put up or shut up. Try buying a full profile on Jay Patel, founder of Akiba. You think they'll sell it to you? The classic question here is who watches the watchers? If the watchers submit to the same public scrutiny as the database subjects, it's somewhat less of a problem than if the watchers reserved privacy for themselves.