I, for one, welcome our new Unedited Cartoon Network... err...
Seriously, suppose Cartoon Network spun off a sister-station, and cable networks made it an optional channel to standard packages, who's purpose was to show anime in its raw form? Parents have the option for nudity and cursing on HBO & Cinemax, and they also have the control whether they want that stuff in their home or not. If you don't want it, the cable company can block it.
I'm not saying that we need a cartoon Spice channel (not that there's any shortage of hentai), just that there should be some medium for your average movie where you can catch the whole thing. The Cartoon Network has an image to keep as a channel for kids (the alternative to Nickelodeon), and they can't risk someones child staying up late and catching some unedited Vampire Hunter D.
Adult Swim has this nostalgic aura about it now (GiJoe, He-Man)... like 80s Strike Back on VH1. And mix in a bit of "here's something cool you didn't know existed"... sort of like catching Most Extreme Elimination Challenge on TNT/SpikeTV. That's what anime is to American audiences... years of shows about robots and vampires, lasers and rockets and giant aliens, fast action and a "new" visual style.
There's something that bugs me about watching a show or movie when I know that it has been edited by some middleman... The director of the project had an artistic vision and those scenes & language capture the intent. You can't express the story of the rough mafia men in the Sopranos without the occasional trip to the strip club... this is what tells the story of men making bad choices and dealing with the consequences.
Umm, all the evidence *IS* in on the recent East coast power outage. You could have gone to the NOAA website and pulled up the data on August 14th, and seen that there were no events, and only an early morning warning that day (yes, I know the page is in GMT, blackout was at 16:10 EPT = 21:10 GMT)... it takes about a K-6 on the scale before the utilities even start considering conservative ops, and we check real-time DC amp ratings at various stations for actual indications of SMD events.
Its well known to anyone who took a fields & waves transmission course, that you can tell where the transmission line faulted by measuring the wave reflection back at the breaker side. Correllating, I like the page in the report where they went to the site of the fault, and it said they found scorched underbrush, but not the tree...:)
The problem is that the governing entity NERC (and its USA-only compatriot FERC) really have no muscle what-so-ever. Its a bunch of beurocrats who make "strong recommendations" all day, but they are not legally empowered by Congress with any authority to actually penalize any agencies that don't follow the regulations.
If the senate had actually passed Bush's Energy Bill last year, then NERC would now have the power to force compliance and penalize non-performers.
As far as tree trimming goes, that's a sign of hard economic times, one of the first programs to go. You are just as likely to see poor trimming in regulated utilities such Carolina Power & Light as you are in deregulated utilities like First Energy. Then you look at deregulated utilities like Excelon that are doing a better job now than they did while regulated, because lost transmission means constrained system == lost profit.
And to this, I disagree completely. Until the US deregulated, we had a vertically-integrated system that was completely comfortable at over-charging the end users (we people in residential load) when the true price of electricity was much lower. Did you know the average locational price of energy in PA last year was $0.027/kWh on the bulk market? How much are you paying per hour to your local utility?
Deregulation simply gave the utilities the opportunity to operate in three parts: Transmission, Generation and Load Serving Entities. Thinking they could make a quick buck, some utilities sold their plants to the highest bidder... nothing wrong with that. But the governments wouldn't let anyone build new generators, so there's a fixed supply of energy with rising demand. Then, a vast majority of local governments went and capped the price which the LSE could pass on to their customers, and freed the prices the Generators could charge. So what happened? The governement regulations drove the LSEs out of business (price of supply >> price recouped), and the result is crashed companies and billions in debt passed on to the residents.
However, Controllers like PJM, NYISO and NEISO adopted Locational Pricing, which did a great job in pinpointing where new generation was needed by raising prices in that area. What do we see today? Lower spot market prices than ever before. An over-capacity glut, where the market made it so desireable we'll have excess power in the northeast for another 4 years.
I blame the politicians out west who did a half-assed job in only deregulating half the industry, because the parts they regulated caused all the problems. Funny thing, the areas of the country that tried to hang on to the policies of their vertical monopolies (California ISO, First Energy) were the ones that faulted in the deregulated system. This should be a warning to the Dominion's, TVAs and the Southern companies who lag behind...
The EMS (Energy Management System) is typically a collection of UNIX machines, each running a specific task towards maintaining grid reliability. It could be Load Forecasting, Transfer Limit Calculations, Contingency Analysis, you name it. The user interfaces I'm familiar with are Motif X Windows based clients on terminals. I don't know about FE, but its become popular in most areas to use VPN tunnelling to a MS Windows machine w/ Exceed to view the screens.
I suppose the point of the original poster was that because X Windows is a server-based application, when the network that communicated alarms failed, it also slowed down the XServer to the point that the dispatchers were waiting minutes between screen refreshes. Whats worse, when it did update, the data delievered to the clients was stale, so what the dispatchers saw wasn't even the real-time situation, which only confused the situation more.
According to the report, First Energy was already scheduled to dump the old EMS cluster, and upgrade I believe next year...
Maybe you should step down from your soap box for a minute and actually learn some facts about what you are ranting about, especially since you have only illustrated your blatent ignorance about the subject matter.
But if you build it in the middle of the desert, you have the exact same problem you have with building other power plants in the middle of nowhere.... transmission lines losses are not trivial. Sure, you can admit losses, but why? Its better to have a distributed generation system, or in this case, a distributed network of receiver dishes. The more dishes, the less of an impact from clouds/fog, less intense beams to carry the power, and no single point of failure like you have with a single large-scale plant. A device like this is *best* in residential area, because it's close to the demand loading, has no visual profile, and emits zero chemical wastes. Not to mention a 100x100 sq ft dish would fit in half an acre of property... compare that to 40 acres for a windfarm.
Well, we know that flinging elephant shit at religious effigies is art... And men sticking things up the asses of other men in leather is art... Oglethorpe proved that at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.
I don't really have a problem with a performer using mechanics to generate the audio... I've heard a bunch of techno artists that "make a bunch of noise", except that they're doing it all from a console (Moby) and the sounds are samples. Personally, it makes absolutely no difference to me how the sounds are generated, because in the end we all listen to our music on radio, CD & mp3...
Mr. Garrison: IT gets over 300 miles to the gallon, and is safely capable of speeds of over 200 miles per hour.
Guests: Whoa. Wow.
Bill Gates: This will change everything.
Steve Jobs: We're going to have to rethnk cities!
Mr. Garrison: [puts on a helmet] Now, IT is easily operated using four flexigrip handles. Two of them are on each side. Left side for throttle, right side for steering. [operates each one as he describes it] The third flexigrip is gently inserted into the anus, to keep the driver in place. [gets into the wheel and activates the flexigrip. It extends into his anus and he groans as it locks him in.]
Guests: Ugh. Oh.
Mr. Garrison:...there we go. Now, the final flexigrip is directly in front of the driver so that its small switches can be operated with the mouth, as such. [begins to suck on the flexigrip, then stops] Put the four together and we're ready to go. [gets the four flexigrips to work in unison and the vehicles takes off, first one way...]
Steve Jobs: Oh my God! [...and then the other. The guests turn to see IT zoom across the yard]
Steve Forbes: Look at it go! [Garrison crashes through the fence and disappears in the distance. Kyle, standing next to the new hole in the fence, isn't hurt]
Bill Gates: But the way it works... do you think people will go through that to travel?
Steve Forbes: Hey, it... still beats what you go through at the airports.
I'm afraid that South Park beat you to it, in the episode The Entity, when Mr Garrison invents a transportation device even more advanced than the Segway... the only downside is that you have to steer it with a lever that's inserted into your anus. Well, *I* consider it a downside...
1. Litigate the Free music trading services into the dust, regardless of legality of content traded on the services.
2. Introduce your own music trading services, except this time you make people pay for any content (even if the artists elect to distribute their music for free, like MP3.com).
Technically everything north of (and including) Panama is in North America: USA, Canada, and Mexico being the largest by area. Here's some maps of North America, which lists 25 countries, most of which are island nations.
In surface area (which is what matters in telecom), the continent of Europe is est. 3,837,000 Sq. Miles (9,938,000 Sq. Km) vs North America at 9,365,000 Sq. Miles (24,256,000 Sq. Km). The United States alone comes out to 3,537,438 Sq. Miles.
If you can order photos and tables from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration going back to 1874, I can only assume that most major observatories have copies of these records, and (given that they are professionals at this subject matter) are more than qualified to say what is an anomoly or not.
Well, common papyrus wasn't exactly the most durable material. That's why most of our information on egypt comes from carved stone sources, and remnants of painted symbols on stone. Copying and re-copying literature was an important job in the middle ages, which is one thing that gave the Church so much power... the monopoly on reading data.
Check out Frederik Pohl's Gateway series... humans find a remnant of an alien outpost on venus, and a ship on autopilot that takes them to a hangar of spaceships on an asteroid. On the stations, they find that the aliens were in an awful rush to abandon the place, and they left behind all these metallic folding fans and other widgets. The humans said "wow, neat, these must have been their toys" and went and sold them as novelty items to the public. It wasn't until the third book or so that the humans "discover" that the fans are solid state storage devices, and that the Heechee had left behind all of the manuals to their machines when they left, and that the fans were newspapers, books, videos, art, etc... everything about their culture... but because the humans had nothing to read the data, they had no concept what the devices represented.
'What do traffic jams, obesity and spam have in common?'
Traffic Jams are caused by a scarcity of roads in the direction that the majority of citizens wish to travel. We can allieve this problem by (1) building more roads, (2) change the tax structure so that it is more desireable for people to live closer to where they work, (3) build more accessable mass transportation systems. The problem is you're fighting NIMBY local commissions who don't want alternal routes through their towns, cities who love their wage taxes driving people to the suburbs, and crappy subsidised mass transits.
At its core, Obesity is an byproduct of genetics combined with a recent societal changes regarding liesure time. Our bodies are built to survive famine, plain and simple. If we provide more food than we are currently burning, then the body stores it as fat, not "knowing" that we in Western civilizations are not lacking food supplies. Some people are more prone to storage, plus our nutritional intake has vastly changed with respect to a century ago (see processed foods). Some people believe there are hormonal reactions to plastics and polyesters that are changing our biological balance. What we need is more research to understand HOW and WHY our bodies are converting all these foods to fats, and develop more chemicals to naturally halt these processes. Excercize works, but as a society, we want the end product without the work. Given time (which our society has plenty of), I believe we will come to understand how these hormones function, and solve this with research.
Spam is a processed meat source... as well as a natural progression in Advertising. It is an extension of junk letters in electronic form, and when you factor in the speed difference in the electronic realm, then you understand the increase speed of advertisement delivery... We don't like it, but you could have predicted it the day that Lycos put their first banner ad at the top of their search pages. What we need to help is MORE email content processing, smarter email clients, servers to authenticate, blacklists & whitelists... and it'll sort itself out. It took a decade to get here, and it'll take time to get out.
The problem is not that we have too much, but that we don't have enough in the right areas.
"France today has roughly four or five million Muslim inhabitants, nearly a tenth of the population. Approximately half have French citizenship. More precise figures are not available, since the French state, being officially secular, is forbidden to inquire into questions of religion. It is generally agreed, however, that France, preponderantly Catholic, now has more Muslims than either Protestants or Jews, its historical minorities. Islam has become the country's second religion."
You cannot forget that in 2002, Chirac's main opponent in his election was a isolationist (Le Pen), illustrating that the french commoners wanted to roll back the recent immigration, and did not like the direction the politicians were taking the country... Chirac has to appease the arabic voters , and the best way he knew how was to counter the United State's forays into Afghanistand and Iraq at every turn, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
You give him too much credit, thinking he was "standing up against the USA", when he is just politicing and covering his ass.
Slashdot Mirror
I, for one, welcome our new Unedited Cartoon Network... err...
... like 80s Strike Back on VH1. And mix in a bit of "here's something cool you didn't know existed"... sort of like catching Most Extreme Elimination Challenge on TNT/SpikeTV. That's what anime is to American audiences... years of shows about robots and vampires, lasers and rockets and giant aliens, fast action and a "new" visual style.
Seriously, suppose Cartoon Network spun off a sister-station, and cable networks made it an optional channel to standard packages, who's purpose was to show anime in its raw form? Parents have the option for nudity and cursing on HBO & Cinemax, and they also have the control whether they want that stuff in their home or not. If you don't want it, the cable company can block it.
I'm not saying that we need a cartoon Spice channel (not that there's any shortage of hentai), just that there should be some medium for your average movie where you can catch the whole thing. The Cartoon Network has an image to keep as a channel for kids (the alternative to Nickelodeon), and they can't risk someones child staying up late and catching some unedited Vampire Hunter D.
Adult Swim has this nostalgic aura about it now (GiJoe, He-Man)
There's something that bugs me about watching a show or movie when I know that it has been edited by some middleman... The director of the project had an artistic vision and those scenes & language capture the intent. You can't express the story of the rough mafia men in the Sopranos without the occasional trip to the strip club... this is what tells the story of men making bad choices and dealing with the consequences.
Umm, all the evidence *IS* in on the recent East coast power outage. You could have gone to the NOAA website and pulled up the data on August 14th, and seen that there were no events, and only an early morning warning that day (yes, I know the page is in GMT, blackout was at 16:10 EPT = 21:10 GMT)... it takes about a K-6 on the scale before the utilities even start considering conservative ops, and we check real-time DC amp ratings at various stations for actual indications of SMD events.
Its well known to anyone who took a fields & waves transmission course, that you can tell where the transmission line faulted by measuring the wave reflection back at the breaker side. Correllating, I like the page in the report where they went to the site of the fault, and it said they found scorched underbrush, but not the tree... :)
The problem is that the governing entity NERC (and its USA-only compatriot FERC) really have no muscle what-so-ever. Its a bunch of beurocrats who make "strong recommendations" all day, but they are not legally empowered by Congress with any authority to actually penalize any agencies that don't follow the regulations.
If the senate had actually passed Bush's Energy Bill last year, then NERC would now have the power to force compliance and penalize non-performers.
As far as tree trimming goes, that's a sign of hard economic times, one of the first programs to go. You are just as likely to see poor trimming in regulated utilities such Carolina Power & Light as you are in deregulated utilities like First Energy. Then you look at deregulated utilities like Excelon that are doing a better job now than they did while regulated, because lost transmission means constrained system == lost profit.
And to this, I disagree completely. Until the US deregulated, we had a vertically-integrated system that was completely comfortable at over-charging the end users (we people in residential load) when the true price of electricity was much lower. Did you know the average locational price of energy in PA last year was $0.027/kWh on the bulk market? How much are you paying per hour to your local utility?
Deregulation simply gave the utilities the opportunity to operate in three parts: Transmission, Generation and Load Serving Entities. Thinking they could make a quick buck, some utilities sold their plants to the highest bidder... nothing wrong with that. But the governments wouldn't let anyone build new generators, so there's a fixed supply of energy with rising demand. Then, a vast majority of local governments went and capped the price which the LSE could pass on to their customers, and freed the prices the Generators could charge. So what happened? The governement regulations drove the LSEs out of business (price of supply >> price recouped), and the result is crashed companies and billions in debt passed on to the residents.
However, Controllers like PJM, NYISO and NEISO adopted Locational Pricing, which did a great job in pinpointing where new generation was needed by raising prices in that area. What do we see today? Lower spot market prices than ever before. An over-capacity glut, where the market made it so desireable we'll have excess power in the northeast for another 4 years.
I blame the politicians out west who did a half-assed job in only deregulating half the industry, because the parts they regulated caused all the problems. Funny thing, the areas of the country that tried to hang on to the policies of their vertical monopolies (California ISO, First Energy) were the ones that faulted in the deregulated system. This should be a warning to the Dominion's, TVAs and the Southern companies who lag behind...
Very very little...
The EMS (Energy Management System) is typically a collection of UNIX machines, each running a specific task towards maintaining grid reliability. It could be Load Forecasting, Transfer Limit Calculations, Contingency Analysis, you name it. The user interfaces I'm familiar with are Motif X Windows based clients on terminals. I don't know about FE, but its become popular in most areas to use VPN tunnelling to a MS Windows machine w/ Exceed to view the screens.
I suppose the point of the original poster was that because X Windows is a server-based application, when the network that communicated alarms failed, it also slowed down the XServer to the point that the dispatchers were waiting minutes between screen refreshes. Whats worse, when it did update, the data delievered to the clients was stale, so what the dispatchers saw wasn't even the real-time situation, which only confused the situation more.
According to the report, First Energy was already scheduled to dump the old EMS cluster, and upgrade I believe next year...
The continent of North America has 25+ countries and territories, "each with their own government".
Maybe you should step down from your soap box for a minute and actually learn some facts about what you are ranting about, especially since you have only illustrated your blatent ignorance about the subject matter.
You can see her tities pretty clearly through that thing why bother at all?
Hey, this is a trend that I'm having NO problem with...
Unlike China & the USSR, when the government lets us down, we turn to private enterprise to make the discoveries.
Well, I guess that when Motorola blitzed my college with chip books, their "advertising" paid off, because Motorola is the first place I looked.
Sensor Device Data Book... all of their sensor chips & schematics, scanned into a PDF. Troll the Motorola website and I'm sure you'll find the other chipset books...
But if you build it in the middle of the desert, you have the exact same problem you have with building other power plants in the middle of nowhere.... transmission lines losses are not trivial. Sure, you can admit losses, but why? Its better to have a distributed generation system, or in this case, a distributed network of receiver dishes. The more dishes, the less of an impact from clouds/fog, less intense beams to carry the power, and no single point of failure like you have with a single large-scale plant. A device like this is *best* in residential area, because it's close to the demand loading, has no visual profile, and emits zero chemical wastes. Not to mention a 100x100 sq ft dish would fit in half an acre of property... compare that to 40 acres for a windfarm.
Well, we know that flinging elephant shit at religious effigies is art... And men sticking things up the asses of other men in leather is art... Oglethorpe proved that at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.
I don't really have a problem with a performer using mechanics to generate the audio... I've heard a bunch of techno artists that "make a bunch of noise", except that they're doing it all from a console (Moby) and the sounds are samples. Personally, it makes absolutely no difference to me how the sounds are generated, because in the end we all listen to our music on radio, CD & mp3...
Figures as soon as I submit, I find the script...
...there we go. Now, the final flexigrip is directly in front of the driver so that its small switches can be operated with the mouth, as such. [begins to suck on the flexigrip, then stops] Put the four together and we're ready to go. [gets the four flexigrips to work in unison and the vehicles takes off, first one way...]
Mr. Garrison: IT gets over 300 miles to the gallon, and is safely capable of speeds of over 200 miles per hour.
Guests: Whoa. Wow.
Bill Gates: This will change everything.
Steve Jobs: We're going to have to rethnk cities!
Mr. Garrison: [puts on a helmet] Now, IT is easily operated using four flexigrip handles. Two of them are on each side. Left side for throttle, right side for steering. [operates each one as he describes it] The third flexigrip is gently inserted into the anus, to keep the driver in place. [gets into the wheel and activates the flexigrip. It extends into his anus and he groans as it locks him in.]
Guests: Ugh. Oh.
Mr. Garrison:
Steve Jobs: Oh my God! [...and then the other. The guests turn to see IT zoom across the yard]
Steve Forbes: Look at it go! [Garrison crashes through the fence and disappears in the distance. Kyle, standing next to the new hole in the fence, isn't hurt]
Bill Gates: But the way it works... do you think people will go through that to travel?
Steve Forbes: Hey, it... still beats what you go through at the airports.
I'm afraid that South Park beat you to it, in the episode The Entity, when Mr Garrison invents a transportation device even more advanced than the Segway... the only downside is that you have to steer it with a lever that's inserted into your anus. Well, *I* consider it a downside...
No big wars, only small ones, and everyone lives happily together. A real land of peace...
Good thing it's safe to live in Europe! Maybe if we don't speak up about terrorists, they'll leave us alone...
1. Litigate the Free music trading services into the dust, regardless of legality of content traded on the services.
2. Introduce your own music trading services, except this time you make people pay for any content (even if the artists elect to distribute their music for free, like MP3.com).
3. Profit!
Technically everything north of (and including) Panama is in North America: USA, Canada, and Mexico being the largest by area. Here's some maps of North America, which lists 25 countries, most of which are island nations.
In surface area (which is what matters in telecom), the continent of Europe is est. 3,837,000 Sq. Miles (9,938,000 Sq. Km) vs North America at 9,365,000 Sq. Miles (24,256,000 Sq. Km). The United States alone comes out to 3,537,438 Sq. Miles.
Shooting Lawyers appears to be really popular lately...
I would have to say Yes .
If you can order photos and tables from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration going back to 1874, I can only assume that most major observatories have copies of these records, and (given that they are professionals at this subject matter) are more than qualified to say what is an anomoly or not.
Well, common papyrus wasn't exactly the most durable material. That's why most of our information on egypt comes from carved stone sources, and remnants of painted symbols on stone. Copying and re-copying literature was an important job in the middle ages, which is one thing that gave the Church so much power... the monopoly on reading data.
Check out Frederik Pohl's Gateway series... humans find a remnant of an alien outpost on venus, and a ship on autopilot that takes them to a hangar of spaceships on an asteroid. On the stations, they find that the aliens were in an awful rush to abandon the place, and they left behind all these metallic folding fans and other widgets. The humans said "wow, neat, these must have been their toys" and went and sold them as novelty items to the public. It wasn't until the third book or so that the humans "discover" that the fans are solid state storage devices, and that the Heechee had left behind all of the manuals to their machines when they left, and that the fans were newspapers, books, videos, art, etc... everything about their culture... but because the humans had nothing to read the data, they had no concept what the devices represented.
'What do traffic jams, obesity and spam have in common?'
Traffic Jams are caused by a scarcity of roads in the direction that the majority of citizens wish to travel. We can allieve this problem by (1) building more roads, (2) change the tax structure so that it is more desireable for people to live closer to where they work, (3) build more accessable mass transportation systems. The problem is you're fighting NIMBY local commissions who don't want alternal routes through their towns, cities who love their wage taxes driving people to the suburbs, and crappy subsidised mass transits.
At its core, Obesity is an byproduct of genetics combined with a recent societal changes regarding liesure time. Our bodies are built to survive famine, plain and simple. If we provide more food than we are currently burning, then the body stores it as fat, not "knowing" that we in Western civilizations are not lacking food supplies. Some people are more prone to storage, plus our nutritional intake has vastly changed with respect to a century ago (see processed foods). Some people believe there are hormonal reactions to plastics and polyesters that are changing our biological balance. What we need is more research to understand HOW and WHY our bodies are converting all these foods to fats, and develop more chemicals to naturally halt these processes. Excercize works, but as a society, we want the end product without the work. Given time (which our society has plenty of), I believe we will come to understand how these hormones function, and solve this with research.
Spam is a processed meat source... as well as a natural progression in Advertising. It is an extension of junk letters in electronic form, and when you factor in the speed difference in the electronic realm, then you understand the increase speed of advertisement delivery... We don't like it, but you could have predicted it the day that Lycos put their first banner ad at the top of their search pages. What we need to help is MORE email content processing, smarter email clients, servers to authenticate, blacklists & whitelists... and it'll sort itself out. It took a decade to get here, and it'll take time to get out.
The problem is not that we have too much, but that we don't have enough in the right areas.
You know, if you tried to leave at 1pm, you'd have all your work done by 5!
Isn't that the goal of any scientist? Explore the world, find new species, and kill them!
Does that make the Blue Screen of Death the inevitable descent into earth's atmosphere?
All you have to do is look at the political landscape of France.
"France today has roughly four or five million Muslim inhabitants, nearly a tenth of the population. Approximately half have French citizenship. More precise figures are not available, since the French state, being officially secular, is forbidden to inquire into questions of religion. It is generally agreed, however, that France, preponderantly Catholic, now has more Muslims than either Protestants or Jews, its historical minorities. Islam has become the country's second religion."
You cannot forget that in 2002, Chirac's main opponent in his election was a isolationist (Le Pen), illustrating that the french commoners wanted to roll back the recent immigration, and did not like the direction the politicians were taking the country... Chirac has to appease the arabic voters , and the best way he knew how was to counter the United State's forays into Afghanistand and Iraq at every turn, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
You give him too much credit, thinking he was "standing up against the USA", when he is just politicing and covering his ass.