Scenario 1: Asteroid strike. I defer to NASA JPL, the Tunguska event (100-meter class = ~ 15 mil tons TNT) asteroid occurs once or twice / 1000 years. A 1000-meter class is 1 in 15 million years. An 8000-meter class (dinosaur killer) is 1 in 50-100 million years.
Scenario 2: Earthquake. San Francisco has an annual forecast of earthquake probabilities, and they predict a 68% probability of a 6.7 Magnitude or greater in the next 30 years. Wikipedia gives a probability scale for earthquakes, where a Magnitude 7 (similar to what struke Haiti) occurs 18 / year. A single 6.7 earthquake (P = 120/year) is equivalent to 16 kilotons of energy, or about 1 Tungaska event (P = 0.004/year).
Given the disparity in the probability of asteroid strikes (on populated areas, no less) vs earthquakes, it should be no surprise that the world governments believe money is better spent on earthquake prediction and evacuation relief, not on asteroid strike detection. The "bang for the buck" is clearly higher in earthquake spending.
First generation CFLs contained a level of mercury that today would be considered excessive (25-50 mg / bulb), and the broken bulbs of early adopters are what spawned the big "EPA cleanup" panic with CFLs a couple of years ago. Since 2007, the mercury level in today's generation of CFLs (3mg) is "mostly harmless", i.e. broom-sweepable.
Individual Fluorescent Bulbs - About 60 percent of all fluorescent lamps sold in the U.S. in 2004 contained 10 mg of mercury or less. The remaining 40 percent contained more than 10 mg and up to 100 mg of mercury. Four-foot linear fluorescent lamps contained an average of 13.3 mg, with a high of 70 mg and a low of 2.5 mg. Compact fluorescents (CFLs) had the least amount of mercury per lamp in 2004; two-thirds of CFLs contained 5 mg of mercury or less, while 96 percent contained 10 mg or less. --Consumer and Commercial Products | Mercury | US EPA
That's funny, because Freakanomics tells us that large gangs tend to act like corporations...
And so what we find when we look carefully is that the gang organization looks a whole lot like a typical corporate structure, a lot like McDonald's in some sense. And so just like McDonald's, it turns out there's a handful of guys at the top who are very successful who run the gang, who are bringing home, you know, mid to high six-figure salaries, but the 90 percent of the guys who are working in the gang are the young kids who are selling drugs on the street corner that it turns out they're getting paid roughly minimum wage for standing on the street corner and selling the drugs. -- Steven Levitt, NPR Interview
I think EVE Online bears this out, how a loosely coupled group of independent yet incentivised players can collectively make a place for themselves in a larger social space. Those larger groups then snap at each other for domination, and it's all the same "game" be it in virtual worlds, social worlds, or economic worlds.
Except it is happening right now, at least in the deregulated portions of the US electric grid. You see, the the electric distribution company (the people who you pay your bill to each month) buys the energy you use from the wholesale market and sells it to you (what's called an end-use customer) at retail rates. Today, retail rates are locked, but in the next year or so many states are deregulating their retail markets, and the real-time retail rate will become a pass-through of hourly wholesale rates plus transmission cost plus profit adder. The transmission costs are fixed because of what it takes to physically deliver energy to your house, and competition will (in theory) drive the profit adder to zero, because an end-use residential customer could just switch to whatever EDC offers the lowest hourly rate. In reality, most end-use customers never switch, despite lower offerings elsewhere, but that's a different issue...
The hourly wholesale price of electricity is a non-linear supply curve (because of the fuel mix) intersecting the real-time demand for electricity (because the technology does not exist to cheaply store bulk electric system scale power). The most important note: As demand grows, the price grows faster. The current price stack, from least to most, is hydroelectric < nuclear < coal < natural gas < diesel oil < wind < solar.
The economic incentive after deregulation is for the EDC is to get the end-use customers to reduce their demand, thus reducing the non-linear real-time energy price, and what better vehicle to do that than the Smart Meter? It's not a coincidence that Smart Meters appeared just as most of the mid-atlantic and midwest states are beginning retail deregulation. The whole design is that the EDC sends the real-time price to the house (directly or via web), and if you don't want to pay that $/kW, then you reduce your usage. That means less over-all cost to the EDC, and as a byproduct, to the customer. Don't kid yourselves that they're doing this for our benefit -- SmartMeters are just another way for them to cut costs.
That's the problem with using hardware to clock your game cycles, we just don't know what the future will bring.
I've read good things about Mo'Slow and Bremze. Mo'Slow was at least updated through 2006 and says it works with XP, but Bremze development appears to have stalled in 2002.
We all asume "space" to be empty, but what if there are pockets of extremely low density gas (low energy plasma?) or dust rotating around the sun at certain spots of the solar system... so sparse that we don't immediately see them with our telescopes, but as the devices flew through the gas, it acted to slow down the craft?
You would only hit it on certain trajectories out, like a cloud to an airplane, sometimes it's just not in your path...
So let met get this straight, a bunch of sites allow uploading of image files without checking the magic numbers to make sure they actually are static image files they say they are, then they display them... and if they are SWF in the browser, there's a bug in SWF that allows malicious code to execute, but the bug is not caught because the file is not really a SWF ?
FirstEnergy still had a requirement to remove vegetation under its wires (while "dangerously deregulated") under state deregulation just as it did as a vertically integrated company. The fact that their maintenence crews failed to do so was FirstEnergy's flaw, not deregulation. They were cutting costs, and since there was no oversight from NERC/FERC, they got away with it, just as they did in the years before they were deregulated. Since 2003, NERC has developed an extensive system of regulatory controls and FERC has been given the ability to levy fines to keep compliance.
And besides, the root cause of the blackout was a deadlock in the mainframe at FirstEnergy, where their staff failed to properly recognize that the system was reporting old data as if it were fresh. FirstEnergy had over an hour and a half to take action to correct for the loss of the transmission lines, but instead failed to observe the overloads which eventually resulting in the separation of the load around Lake Erie and the eventual blackout along the PA/NJ border between GPU, PS, and NYISO. The government's report was very watered down on this area.
This might help you understand the root causes, instead of blaming some phantom "deregulation" as the root of all evil.
Oh, and Quebec was isolated from the rest of the Eastern Interconnection (connected only via HVDC ties) in 1990 because of its demonstrated repeated inability to stop cascading blackouts, long long before deregulation hit the scene. Quebec physically could not be affected by the 2003 blackout on the HVAC system.
You just described the deregulated Open Access Transmission bulk electric system, which has been in effect since about 1992.
Transmission companies own and maintain the wires, while everyone else purchases transmission service (at various levels of guaranteed flow) for the right to move energy across the system from a point of delivery into the grid to a point of receipt where the energy is removed. The areas of the country that have implemented wholesale deregulation have seen incredible competition; unfortunately, the retail side of the industry has not seen the benefit because of how states seized power through their public utility comissions to slow the deregulation...
I had a high school english teacher who gave me a C+ on a book report on The Time Machine because I failed to mention the nuclear war... that occurred only in the 1960 movie version, not the book.
In retrospect, this should have been self-evident to the teacher, since the story was written in 1895, before Bohr suggested there was even such a thing as an atomic nucleus in 1913.
Somehow, we all managed to survive from 1984 to 1995 by swapping 64k chunks in Expanded Memory. I remember writing assembly to do it, and I personally do not miss that headache. That being said, old ideas die hard, and if we can get some larger page sizes (how about swapping that 4th GB in address space to point at a 5th, 6th, etc?), almost all reasonable applications (by today's standards) could fit in the expanded memory space.
Here's a reference to "the 36 plots" that are common to almost every drama ever written, translated to the context of paper-based RPGs.
You are exactly right, in that is is how you use the plot device, not what the plot device is... which should be more apparent given how small the set of plot devices really is.
I'm seeing a few posts here complaining that Microsoft won't implement the SVG 1.1 standard in Internet Explorer.
I would argue that as long as Microsoft continues to push Silverlight (which is just browser-safe WPF) as their form of a vector graphics applet for their web browser, any alternative approach within MS is going to stagnate. Silverlight is their attempt to build a Flash-alternative with a SVG programming framework, which is (to Microsoft) a "best" of both worlds. To the rest of us coming from the WinForms world, it's a so-so product that's really awkward to use. I known that MS is pushing Expression Blend as an alternative to Adobe CS3's UI, but really, why didn't they just integrate it into Visual Studio for native editing instead of all this back-and-forth multiwindow crap.
For example, SVG Shapes vs WPF Shapes. It's no accident that the syntax is almost exact. But why would Microsoft embrace SVG directly, with its Javascript code triggers, when they can go the Silverlight route with.Net triggers.. it's basic product bundling, to get you to use Microsoft's approach to everything.
You have mistakenly assumed that they want your power.
The rate case that the public utility commision and the distribution company agree to compensates the distribution company for the transmission costs to deliver power to your house. If you end up using less electricity, then the existing built lines are under-utilized, which means less need to upgrade, which is less future revenue for the distribution company.
Exactly. And that's exactly what is happening here.
Let me put it this way, currently an end-use customer is getting billed transmission (the correct term at this level is "distribution") charges on the net energy consumed.
In theory, a house without solar panels is only consuming, therefore the net consumption is the gross consumption and the transmission component (which was already baked in the bill) would compensate the distribution company for transmission of energy into the house. More importantly, this net energy use is read once a month, and doesn't split production/consumption.
But, a house with solar panels would net to (near) zero, as the energy produced during the day offsets the energy consumed at night. The net is zero, but the gross energy in/out most certainly isn't. The distribution company must still maintain the lines that allows the house to sell its energy back to the grid, as well as deliver energy to be consumed at night, but the distribution company is no longer being compensated by houses with solar, unless there's a rate structure change.
Now, the rate structure change is here as the new proposed fee.
Unfortunately, the article mis-states that houses with solar "use no electricity in a given month". They net no energy usage in a given month, but clearly push and pull many electrons into the grid, thus the need for maintenence distribution maintenence, and the resulting charge.
The only way a house with solar should get out of this fee is if they were off the grid entirely, or were able to form a municipal cooperate where multiple houses could net their power/storage and not need the connection to the eastern interconnection.
Our company rolled out an upgrade from Microsoft Windows 2000 + Office 2002 to Vista + Office 2007 last fall. Needless to say, it was not exactly the smoothest of transitions... so we have the Ribbon, which is creating a polarizing user experiences between new and old users. Powerusers in Excel are completely exasperated, filled with hate towards MS and actually asking for Office XP downgrades just so they can get the toolbars back. It now takes 4 clicks to do things that used to be 1 click, or none because the keyboard commands were actually stable and not tab sensitive...
Personally, I'm coping with it, because I don't have an option. So, embracing the ribbon, it's bugging the heck out of me because the whole damn thing is anti-intuitive:
Why is Row and Column Insert on the Home menu, and not the Insert menu?
Table creation is on the Home tab, and not on the Insert tab Table section, unless you actually want to manipulate the table, in which case commands are on the Data tab
I click on a Table, and I get a context sensitive tab, to recolor it, but not to sort or filter? No, those commands are in a right-click contect menu of the Table. At least you can get the traditional cross-tab format back by going into the context menu.
I use PivotTables all the time. They used to be on the Data menu, since you are processing data, but now they are on the Insert tab.
Right-click and Format a cell, and the window is Tabs options across the top. Right-click on a chart and Format an axis, and Tabs are on the left going down.
Number Formatting for cells: Right-click a cell, click the Number tab; or use the Home tab Number section. You can type in the combo box in the Home tab, but don't actually enter a Custom formatting string here, because it won't work; that only works when you use the right-click menu.
Number Formatting for charts: Right-click an axis, click the Number tab, and it looks the same as cell formatting -- BUT unlike all the rest of the menu options that are applied immediately (notice no [Apply] button here), number formatting doesn't apply until you hit the [Add] button. Oh, and don't think about using the Home tab Number section on a chart, it won't work, even though you are applying the exact same formatting
Oh, and why do I have to go to Google to figure out how to un-break a Surface Chart being used as a top-down contour map? Surface Charts now automatically have a 3D shadow style applied by default, which makes the top-down look like crap. Each series, you now have to click 3-D Format -> Surface -> Lighting -> Flat
Style and Line Coloring, very nice, until you try to use an Excel chart in PowerPoint or Word, and it recolors all of your data with the new application's Style, even if you changed the line and fill colors.
Thank you Microsoft, for helping me where I didn't know I needed help.
Put a cap on the emissions that industry can output, then create a market where companies can trade the right to pollute. Cap and Trade.
The big question is, what is this Change going to do to the US economy?
Create asymmetry between US industry and global industry for future growth. Why should I build my factory in the USA and go through the regulations when it just became more profitable to build it overseas?
Existing price structures are scrambled. Estimates from the power industry say that once you add in the costs of Cap-and-trade, this will make Coal more expensive than Natural Gas fuel, completely flipping the fuel makeups of almost all electricity production markets. Since Coal is used as fuel for about half of the energy production in the US, this will be disasterous to the wholesale markets. Since corporations always pass costs down to consumers, expect to see your retail electric bills go up by 5-15%, or an average of $700-1400 per family per year.
Who exactly is benefitting here? Estimates are that about $50 to $300 billion is getting ready to change hands, with the government running the auction for the "rights" to pollute. It essentially puts extra costs on industry that uses polluting fuels, and the claims are that some of the money will become subsidies to cleaner/greener energy producers. Since zero-emission technology is currently 3x as expensive as fossil based technologies, there will not be any savings to the public, hense the comparisons to a "tax" for the public.
While all of cap-and-trade appears very poorly thought out, Pres. Obama actually fully intended this to happen, as interviewed almost a year ago. So, hold on to your wallet, change is coming...
From my MBA economics teacher, in today's information economy, a firm now has approximately two years to have market power, then the sheer number of other players in the market will destroy the first-runner's ability to lead. There are too many competators that can hire their own programmers and make their own hardware, competing products are bound to arrive.
So, Apple has two choices: innovate or cut costs. What will the iPhone+ be able to do that the current one can't do... err, it already does music, camera, QUERTY, video... what more can it integrate with? Apple introduces email integration, which puts them in competition with RIM, but is that enough? They're kind of up against a wall unless they can think out of the box (again), but MS's Zune HD appears to be leading there with console controller integration, an untapped area.
So, the other option to remain a leader is to reduce the costs; and that's what's Apple is rumored to do next Monday, and what AT&T is doing on the O&M side to drive up demand. From the article, "According to Gartner, a research group, Apple sells 11% of the world's smartphones, compared to Nokia's 41% and Research in Motion's 20%." --> Apple has a ways to go and their market position is beginning to slip.
But as more competition comes into the arena, they will be able to beat Apply on the cost-side too. Apple needs to find something on the hardware side to expand its capabilities (bigger better faster) or to charge off into uncharted competative waters and make the iPhone compete with someone else's product (completely different: TV receiver? broadcast radio? )...
If you're playing in Windows C#Net, you really want to take a look at WPF. Microsoft basically "embraced" the SVG spec into the System.Windows.Media objects, and "extended" the objects to mesh with the rest of the architecture, and wrapped it all with binding properties so it can do some pretty interesting stuff. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms742562.aspx
The saying is "brass tacks", and comes from the textile industry. In the 1800's, there were few accurate rulers for long distances, so the merchants used brass tacks spaced on their counter-tops, hammered into the boards at measured intervals. Plus: certify it when they're hammered in, so they make a good standard that the merchant isn't ripping you off, plus you can't adjust them without visual evidence. The customer would look at the bolts of fabric, choose a style, then they would "get down to brass tacks" to determine how much to cut, and you only get to cut once. Today, the saying relates to getting serious about the topic at hand.
Incidentally, thanks to Wikipedia, we now know that the tape measure wasn't invented until the 1860s, and wasn't in widespread use until the 1940s.
I fear progressive authoritarianism operating under the guise of a liberal democracy. I fear those who would tear down our current society to enforce a raw democracy, guided by the "enlightened" elite, using propaganda via the media to steer the masses, creating a perception of "have-nots" so they can hate those that don't like where the system is taking us. Those that don't follow are run over; it's not a new concept, after all, these tactics have been around since "Philip Dru: Administrator", 1917.
We're being steered away from the republic, because a republic represents the freedom to get away from bad decisions made by others. "Why do we need an electoral congress when we can just let the people decide?" No... we have a democracy where you only need a majority to decide that someone else should pay for what you want, a fear that the Founding Fathers voiced often. There's a reason why they call it a progressive tax code, such that today 90% of the public pays 30% of the federal tax. Our "closing the loophoole" will end up chasing away the 10% that actually generates the cash for our society.
We have the media in league with the POTUS, in 100 days reporting favorable stories in a 2:1 ratio over the last president, yes 42% vs 20% favorably biased stories. And it's just not NBC or CNN... They steer the national conversations, and under the guise of entertainment (ComedyCentral, of Viacom, which lest we forget owned CBS up until 2006), they ridicule those that don't fall in line with their political ideology. John Stewart rips apart Cramer thanks to his NYSE executive brother, then falls back on "I'm just an entertainer" when his beliefs are cornered...
It's not socialism, no, because at least there they told you up front that the system was being run by the elite to forcefully equate the masses, except for those at the top of course. It's not fascism this time around either, because under fascism the corporations run the government, when today the government is itching to run the corporations (another $4.5 billion 1 hour ago). It's authoritarianism, chipping away our freedoms, our options, our future. Spending money they don't have today, telling us what we can't believe, then using the 1920's progressive tactics of criticising and ridiculing the non-believers.
In PA today, there are 4.4 million registered Democrat voters, versus 3.1 million registered Republican voters. I would suggest that Fox is correct in stating that there are many (R) who are feeling betrayed today.
Slashdot Mirror
The three most annoying features of YouTube won't display? Where do I sign?
Scenario 1: Asteroid strike. I defer to NASA JPL, the Tunguska event (100-meter class = ~ 15 mil tons TNT) asteroid occurs once or twice / 1000 years. A 1000-meter class is 1 in 15 million years. An 8000-meter class (dinosaur killer) is 1 in 50-100 million years.
Scenario 2: Earthquake. San Francisco has an annual forecast of earthquake probabilities, and they predict a 68% probability of a 6.7 Magnitude or greater in the next 30 years. Wikipedia gives a probability scale for earthquakes, where a Magnitude 7 (similar to what struke Haiti) occurs 18 / year. A single 6.7 earthquake (P = 120/year) is equivalent to 16 kilotons of energy, or about 1 Tungaska event (P = 0.004/year).
Given the disparity in the probability of asteroid strikes (on populated areas, no less) vs earthquakes, it should be no surprise that the world governments believe money is better spent on earthquake prediction and evacuation relief, not on asteroid strike detection. The "bang for the buck" is clearly higher in earthquake spending.
First generation CFLs contained a level of mercury that today would be considered excessive (25-50 mg / bulb), and the broken bulbs of early adopters are what spawned the big "EPA cleanup" panic with CFLs a couple of years ago. Since 2007, the mercury level in today's generation of CFLs (3mg) is "mostly harmless", i.e. broom-sweepable.
Individual Fluorescent Bulbs - About 60 percent of all fluorescent lamps sold in the U.S. in 2004 contained 10 mg of mercury or less. The remaining 40 percent contained more than 10 mg and up to 100 mg of mercury. Four-foot linear fluorescent lamps contained an average of 13.3 mg, with a high of 70 mg and a low of 2.5 mg. Compact fluorescents (CFLs) had the least amount of mercury per lamp in 2004; two-thirds of CFLs contained 5 mg of mercury or less, while 96 percent contained 10 mg or less. --Consumer and Commercial Products | Mercury | US EPA
And so what we find when we look carefully is that the gang organization looks a whole lot like a typical corporate structure, a lot like McDonald's in some sense. And so just like McDonald's, it turns out there's a handful of guys at the top who are very successful who run the gang, who are bringing home, you know, mid to high six-figure salaries, but the 90 percent of the guys who are working in the gang are the young kids who are selling drugs on the street corner that it turns out they're getting paid roughly minimum wage for standing on the street corner and selling the drugs. -- Steven Levitt, NPR Interview
I think EVE Online bears this out, how a loosely coupled group of independent yet incentivised players can collectively make a place for themselves in a larger social space. Those larger groups then snap at each other for domination, and it's all the same "game" be it in virtual worlds, social worlds, or economic worlds.
Except it is happening right now, at least in the deregulated portions of the US electric grid. You see, the the electric distribution company (the people who you pay your bill to each month) buys the energy you use from the wholesale market and sells it to you (what's called an end-use customer) at retail rates. Today, retail rates are locked, but in the next year or so many states are deregulating their retail markets, and the real-time retail rate will become a pass-through of hourly wholesale rates plus transmission cost plus profit adder. The transmission costs are fixed because of what it takes to physically deliver energy to your house, and competition will (in theory) drive the profit adder to zero, because an end-use residential customer could just switch to whatever EDC offers the lowest hourly rate. In reality, most end-use customers never switch, despite lower offerings elsewhere, but that's a different issue...
The hourly wholesale price of electricity is a non-linear supply curve (because of the fuel mix) intersecting the real-time demand for electricity (because the technology does not exist to cheaply store bulk electric system scale power). The most important note: As demand grows, the price grows faster. The current price stack, from least to most, is hydroelectric < nuclear < coal < natural gas < diesel oil < wind < solar.
The economic incentive after deregulation is for the EDC is to get the end-use customers to reduce their demand, thus reducing the non-linear real-time energy price, and what better vehicle to do that than the Smart Meter? It's not a coincidence that Smart Meters appeared just as most of the mid-atlantic and midwest states are beginning retail deregulation. The whole design is that the EDC sends the real-time price to the house (directly or via web), and if you don't want to pay that $/kW, then you reduce your usage. That means less over-all cost to the EDC, and as a byproduct, to the customer. Don't kid yourselves that they're doing this for our benefit -- SmartMeters are just another way for them to cut costs.
That's the problem with using hardware to clock your game cycles, we just don't know what the future will bring.
I've read good things about Mo'Slow and Bremze. Mo'Slow was at least updated through 2006 and says it works with XP, but Bremze development appears to have stalled in 2002.
We all asume "space" to be empty, but what if there are pockets of extremely low density gas (low energy plasma?) or dust rotating around the sun at certain spots of the solar system... so sparse that we don't immediately see them with our telescopes, but as the devices flew through the gas, it acted to slow down the craft?
You would only hit it on certain trajectories out, like a cloud to an airplane, sometimes it's just not in your path...
So let met get this straight, a bunch of sites allow uploading of image files without checking the magic numbers to make sure they actually are static image files they say they are, then they display them... and if they are SWF in the browser, there's a bug in SWF that allows malicious code to execute, but the bug is not caught because the file is not really a SWF ?
Close, but you got all of the reasons wrong.
FirstEnergy still had a requirement to remove vegetation under its wires (while "dangerously deregulated") under state deregulation just as it did as a vertically integrated company. The fact that their maintenence crews failed to do so was FirstEnergy's flaw, not deregulation. They were cutting costs, and since there was no oversight from NERC/FERC, they got away with it, just as they did in the years before they were deregulated. Since 2003, NERC has developed an extensive system of regulatory controls and FERC has been given the ability to levy fines to keep compliance.
And besides, the root cause of the blackout was a deadlock in the mainframe at FirstEnergy, where their staff failed to properly recognize that the system was reporting old data as if it were fresh. FirstEnergy had over an hour and a half to take action to correct for the loss of the transmission lines, but instead failed to observe the overloads which eventually resulting in the separation of the load around Lake Erie and the eventual blackout along the PA/NJ border between GPU, PS, and NYISO. The government's report was very watered down on this area.
This might help you understand the root causes, instead of blaming some phantom "deregulation" as the root of all evil.
Oh, and Quebec was isolated from the rest of the Eastern Interconnection (connected only via HVDC ties) in 1990 because of its demonstrated repeated inability to stop cascading blackouts, long long before deregulation hit the scene. Quebec physically could not be affected by the 2003 blackout on the HVAC system.
You just described the deregulated Open Access Transmission bulk electric system, which has been in effect since about 1992.
Transmission companies own and maintain the wires, while everyone else purchases transmission service (at various levels of guaranteed flow) for the right to move energy across the system from a point of delivery into the grid to a point of receipt where the energy is removed. The areas of the country that have implemented wholesale deregulation have seen incredible competition; unfortunately, the retail side of the industry has not seen the benefit because of how states seized power through their public utility comissions to slow the deregulation ...
The last time I checked, the only field that runs perpendicular to a magnetic field is an electric field.
I had a high school english teacher who gave me a C+ on a book report on The Time Machine because I failed to mention the nuclear war... that occurred only in the 1960 movie version, not the book.
In retrospect, this should have been self-evident to the teacher, since the story was written in 1895, before Bohr suggested there was even such a thing as an atomic nucleus in 1913.
Needless to say, I had my grade corrected.
Somehow, we all managed to survive from 1984 to 1995 by swapping 64k chunks in Expanded Memory. I remember writing assembly to do it, and I personally do not miss that headache. That being said, old ideas die hard, and if we can get some larger page sizes (how about swapping that 4th GB in address space to point at a 5th, 6th, etc?), almost all reasonable applications (by today's standards) could fit in the expanded memory space.
Here's a reference to "the 36 plots" that are common to almost every drama ever written, translated to the context of paper-based RPGs.
You are exactly right, in that is is how you use the plot device, not what the plot device is... which should be more apparent given how small the set of plot devices really is.
I'm seeing a few posts here complaining that Microsoft won't implement the SVG 1.1 standard in Internet Explorer.
I would argue that as long as Microsoft continues to push Silverlight (which is just browser-safe WPF) as their form of a vector graphics applet for their web browser, any alternative approach within MS is going to stagnate. Silverlight is their attempt to build a Flash-alternative with a SVG programming framework, which is (to Microsoft) a "best" of both worlds. To the rest of us coming from the WinForms world, it's a so-so product that's really awkward to use. I known that MS is pushing Expression Blend as an alternative to Adobe CS3's UI, but really, why didn't they just integrate it into Visual Studio for native editing instead of all this back-and-forth multiwindow crap.
For example, SVG Shapes vs WPF Shapes. It's no accident that the syntax is almost exact. But why would Microsoft embrace SVG directly, with its Javascript code triggers, when they can go the Silverlight route with .Net triggers.. it's basic product bundling, to get you to use Microsoft's approach to everything.
You have mistakenly assumed that they want your power.
The rate case that the public utility commision and the distribution company agree to compensates the distribution company for the transmission costs to deliver power to your house. If you end up using less electricity, then the existing built lines are under-utilized, which means less need to upgrade, which is less future revenue for the distribution company.
Exactly. And that's exactly what is happening here.
Let me put it this way, currently an end-use customer is getting billed transmission (the correct term at this level is "distribution") charges on the net energy consumed.
In theory, a house without solar panels is only consuming, therefore the net consumption is the gross consumption and the transmission component (which was already baked in the bill) would compensate the distribution company for transmission of energy into the house. More importantly, this net energy use is read once a month, and doesn't split production/consumption.
But, a house with solar panels would net to (near) zero, as the energy produced during the day offsets the energy consumed at night. The net is zero, but the gross energy in/out most certainly isn't. The distribution company must still maintain the lines that allows the house to sell its energy back to the grid, as well as deliver energy to be consumed at night, but the distribution company is no longer being compensated by houses with solar, unless there's a rate structure change.
Now, the rate structure change is here as the new proposed fee.
Unfortunately, the article mis-states that houses with solar "use no electricity in a given month". They net no energy usage in a given month, but clearly push and pull many electrons into the grid, thus the need for maintenence distribution maintenence, and the resulting charge.
The only way a house with solar should get out of this fee is if they were off the grid entirely, or were able to form a municipal cooperate where multiple houses could net their power/storage and not need the connection to the eastern interconnection.
Our company rolled out an upgrade from Microsoft Windows 2000 + Office 2002 to Vista + Office 2007 last fall. Needless to say, it was not exactly the smoothest of transitions... so we have the Ribbon, which is creating a polarizing user experiences between new and old users. Powerusers in Excel are completely exasperated, filled with hate towards MS and actually asking for Office XP downgrades just so they can get the toolbars back. It now takes 4 clicks to do things that used to be 1 click, or none because the keyboard commands were actually stable and not tab sensitive...
Personally, I'm coping with it, because I don't have an option. So, embracing the ribbon, it's bugging the heck out of me because the whole damn thing is anti-intuitive:
Thank you Microsoft, for helping me where I didn't know I needed help.
Put a cap on the emissions that industry can output, then create a market where companies can trade the right to pollute. Cap and Trade.
The big question is, what is this Change going to do to the US economy?
While all of cap-and-trade appears very poorly thought out, Pres. Obama actually fully intended this to happen, as interviewed almost a year ago. So, hold on to your wallet, change is coming...
From my MBA economics teacher, in today's information economy, a firm now has approximately two years to have market power, then the sheer number of other players in the market will destroy the first-runner's ability to lead. There are too many competators that can hire their own programmers and make their own hardware, competing products are bound to arrive.
So, Apple has two choices: innovate or cut costs. What will the iPhone+ be able to do that the current one can't do... err, it already does music, camera, QUERTY, video... what more can it integrate with? Apple introduces email integration, which puts them in competition with RIM, but is that enough? They're kind of up against a wall unless they can think out of the box (again), but MS's Zune HD appears to be leading there with console controller integration, an untapped area.
So, the other option to remain a leader is to reduce the costs; and that's what's Apple is rumored to do next Monday, and what AT&T is doing on the O&M side to drive up demand. From the article, "According to Gartner, a research group, Apple sells 11% of the world's smartphones, compared to Nokia's 41% and Research in Motion's 20%." --> Apple has a ways to go and their market position is beginning to slip.
But as more competition comes into the arena, they will be able to beat Apply on the cost-side too. Apple needs to find something on the hardware side to expand its capabilities (bigger better faster) or to charge off into uncharted competative waters and make the iPhone compete with someone else's product (completely different: TV receiver? broadcast radio? )...
If you're playing in Windows C#Net, you really want to take a look at WPF. Microsoft basically "embraced" the SVG spec into the System.Windows.Media objects, and "extended" the objects to mesh with the rest of the architecture, and wrapped it all with binding properties so it can do some pretty interesting stuff. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms742562.aspx
The saying is "brass tacks", and comes from the textile industry. In the 1800's, there were few accurate rulers for long distances, so the merchants used brass tacks spaced on their counter-tops, hammered into the boards at measured intervals. Plus: certify it when they're hammered in, so they make a good standard that the merchant isn't ripping you off, plus you can't adjust them without visual evidence. The customer would look at the bolts of fabric, choose a style, then they would "get down to brass tacks" to determine how much to cut, and you only get to cut once. Today, the saying relates to getting serious about the topic at hand.
Incidentally, thanks to Wikipedia, we now know that the tape measure wasn't invented until the 1860s, and wasn't in widespread use until the 1940s.
The 0 digit appears after 9, so it counts as a 10, and makes a sound of 10 ticks.
If having 0 mean 0 rotary ticks, how would the system ever know that you moved the rotary?
Here's some -isms for you...
I fear progressive authoritarianism operating under the guise of a liberal democracy. I fear those who would tear down our current society to enforce a raw democracy, guided by the "enlightened" elite, using propaganda via the media to steer the masses, creating a perception of "have-nots" so they can hate those that don't like where the system is taking us. Those that don't follow are run over; it's not a new concept, after all, these tactics have been around since "Philip Dru: Administrator", 1917.
We're being steered away from the republic, because a republic represents the freedom to get away from bad decisions made by others. "Why do we need an electoral congress when we can just let the people decide?" No... we have a democracy where you only need a majority to decide that someone else should pay for what you want, a fear that the Founding Fathers voiced often. There's a reason why they call it a progressive tax code, such that today 90% of the public pays 30% of the federal tax. Our "closing the loophoole" will end up chasing away the 10% that actually generates the cash for our society.
We have the media in league with the POTUS, in 100 days reporting favorable stories in a 2:1 ratio over the last president, yes 42% vs 20% favorably biased stories. And it's just not NBC or CNN... They steer the national conversations, and under the guise of entertainment (ComedyCentral, of Viacom, which lest we forget owned CBS up until 2006), they ridicule those that don't fall in line with their political ideology. John Stewart rips apart Cramer thanks to his NYSE executive brother, then falls back on "I'm just an entertainer" when his beliefs are cornered...
It's not socialism, no, because at least there they told you up front that the system was being run by the elite to forcefully equate the masses, except for those at the top of course. It's not fascism this time around either, because under fascism the corporations run the government, when today the government is itching to run the corporations (another $4.5 billion 1 hour ago). It's authoritarianism, chipping away our freedoms, our options, our future. Spending money they don't have today, telling us what we can't believe, then using the 1920's progressive tactics of criticising and ridiculing the non-believers.
In PA today, there are 4.4 million registered Democrat voters, versus 3.1 million registered Republican voters. I would suggest that Fox is correct in stating that there are many (R) who are feeling betrayed today.