These people have never been to a Fry's. If you've never been to one, picture this: they sell porn and energy drinks within 20 feet of each other.
Obviously, you've never been to a Fry's, either. They have more than 50 feet of rechargeable batteries. The porn and the energy drinks, are, alas, some 170 yards apart in what appears to have once been an aircraft hangar for dirgibles.
PS: I've never used pornotube. I googled "youtube clone porn" and it came up. Truthfully, I don't care about porn - I'm happily married and nothing a porn video portrays compares to the real thing from a willing partner. But if that's your gig...
They guy that invented QWERTY did just fine. You are probably just missing his goal. The goal was to slow down typists. With a manual hammer type typewriter, typing too fast jams the machine. Congratulations! You've just perpetuated an urbanlegend.
I strongly consider you to perform a modicum of research before you regurgitate knowledge you got at a party while partly intoxicated, and hoping to get that girl-in-the-green-dress' phone number.
Oh wait... do you get invited to those kinds of parties? Perhaps you think digital watches are a pretty cool idea?
I was on a railroad photographers' list for a while, and I remember the digital/analog debate came up one time. Someone said, "I'll be laughing when you lose all your files because your hard drive crashed and don't have pictures any more!" Obviously he never considered he could easily lose his negatives/slides, or have them damaged in a flood or fire. Analog media has different risks and storage requirements, but they BOTH require proper storage. (And, frankly, digital has the additional advantage that it can be easily backed up at multiple sites with no loss in quality.)
As somebody who's just had an important database server go down YESTERDAY due to a disk failure, I can assure you that, while photographs can be flooded out, or the building burned down, a HDD failure is LOTS AND LOTS more likely. So the guy has a point - unless you actually ARE taking advantage of the ability to copy to multiple sites...
We are so set up, so the database server going down resulted in about 20 minutes of partial downtime while we brought up a snapshot on a hot failover server. (which was already pre-imaged, configured, and ready to go as a "just in case")
"x86 virtualization is about basically placing another nearly full kernel, full of new bugs, on top of a nasty x86 architecture which barely has correct page protection. Then running your operating system on the other side of this brand new pile of shit. You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a worldwide collection of software engineers who can't write operating systems or applications without security holes, can then turn around and suddenly write virtualization layers without security holes." Long response:
I present to you, the rule of profanity: The use of profanity in any kind of prepared statement is proof positive of the weakness of the underlying argument.
It may or may not be true. But it's perceived as true by many, if not most, so it might as well be true. And in this case, poor Theo shot himself in the foot.
Profanity is used to add weight to a statement, but it's a very crude, rough kind of weight. As in "Oh shit, I've just been shot!" can be said by anybody, because being shot is, well, rough. But "shit" when talking about X86 code is just... quaint. And low brow. And self defeating.
Is the X86 instruction set weak? Yeah. Sure is. I won't argue that point. But the X86 instruction set has a strength that cannot be denied - it's compatible with a vast percentage of the software out there in the binary landscape. Everything from the flash player to freeDOS, all works with X86 first. It's an "upward spiral" where the mere inertia of the platform causes more people to jump on the bandwagon, which further increases the inertia, etc.
It's how ideological wars are won, and truth be told, X86 is an ideology as much as an engineering practice. X86 will continue to rule the day until the basic rules of computing change. This "sea change" will make X86 computing irrelevant, and there are already several things that might do this: Virtualization might be this. The Internet itself is a powerful driving force, since, with commodity exchange formats, the X86 platform offers reduced value. And finally, there's quantum computing out there, on the horizon.
But X86 has been actively developed for just shy of 30 years and the incredible investment in making it work, despite its warts, is high enough and profitable enough to nearly eliminate alternate platforms. AMD proved this with their Opteron processor, to replace X86 you first have to emulate it. Perfectly.
And I, myself, am an example of the strength of the X86 - I won't even consider anything but X86 for my servers - what I have works, and the perceived risk in going with anything else is greater than the relatively low, commodity cost of a new server. I can spend $2,500 on a nice, whitebox 1U Rackmount server and get all the bells and whistles, hundreds of GB of RAID 1 10K SCSI drives, 8 GB of ECC RAM, and 4 cores, each running at close to 3 Ghz.
That's an awful lot of power for the buck. Combined with reasonably well-designed software, and you have a mighty effective information processing tool that can single-handledly make hundreds, maybe thousands of users happy.
They passed a law a few years ago saying that you have to report it to police if you find CP on someone's machine.
You know, ysnuae. (You Should Not Use Acronyms Excessively)
Because, "cp" is a commonly-used *nix command to copy files. It took me a few re-reads and a moment or two to realize that you probably mean "Child Porn". I almost skipped your post; next time, if you want to be read, take the extra 9 seconds it would take to move your pointer finger to the various keys and type the whole thing out!
Another great guy from Red Hat is Bob Young who went on to start LULU.com. This guy really groks the whole "open source" thing. Since I've built my million-dollar business on the back of RedHat Linux, I can say with complete honesty, I really appreciate their efforts!
AFAIK, when you turn information into your lawyer, it's protected by "client-attorney priviledge". Your attorney can know that you murdered somebody, and is under no obligation to tell anybody. (In fact, he/she could be sanctioned or disbarred if they DID tell anybody)
So, could you offer a bonded "secure" computer repair service through attorneys?
When it's a choice between that and your own urine, which has been reprocessed through the spaceship urine reprocessing system 700 times, the dirty ice will start to look mighty appealing.
The water that pours out of your sink has been urine so many times, it's impossible to count. There's clean water, and there's dirty water. Various processes clean water, (such as evaporation & condensation) and various processes dirty water (such as drinking it) but that's all there is.
I remember reading a thesis which asserted that nobody alive today can drink a glass of water that doesn't contain at least 1 molecule of water which was in one of the infamous baths of England's King Louis. It's a cycle. Just because modern technology shortens the cycle, doesn't mean the cycle isn't there in the first place.
This is really the worst part of modern software-development practices. When users complain about bugs, they are met with hostile demands to explain exactly, how to reproduce the bug, and the complainer is always presumed to be doing something wrong. Those, who aren't willing to put up with the hostility are not even deemed worthy of being a user -- if you had a bug, you should've reported it!
Obviously, you aren't a developer. If you were, you'd know what they are dealing with.
You write some software, test it, and release it. You sink your heart and soul into it, you design it meticulously, and you are careful to leave the end-user in a position of strength - they can do whatever they want. You explain how to use it to the rest of your staff. They start training end users. Shortly, the calls start to flood back. How does NNN work? Why does "XXX" do that when you click on the button? And so on.
At first, you're all too happy to explain how NN feature works. But after a few years, while you're still explaining how feature NN works, you realize that you have documentation, notes on the website, an embedded help system, a features list, and a nice website that all explain the issue at hand.
You are willing to accomodate the fact that end users are not programmers. You ask for language, improvements, etc. that make it easier to understand what's going on.
But despite documentation and careful training, most calls I get are NOT bugs or problems, they are examples of the software doing exactly what it was supposed to do. I remember one support call I got that sounded like very serious data loss. The end-user denied seeing any error messages or anything by the program that would indicate any data loss. This end user went through several support staff before finally coming to me, the "chief tech weenie".
To avoid any ambiguity, I ran a Remote Desktop tool (VNC inside an NSIS installer) so that I could see what the end user was actually seeing. And right in the middle of the conversation, our software kicked up an error with a message that started with "PAY ATTENTION - YOU MIGHT LOSE DATA", which then explained the whole situation in pretty plain English. The end user was mid-sentence with me when this error popped up, and without skipping a beat, she clicked on the "ok" button. There was no pitch change, no pause, nothing in her voice. When I asked about the error message, she replied with "Oh, I see that all the time, and I just click OK".
So I had the fun of explaining to her that the message she hadn't bothered to read explained why she was losing data, and that the program had been laying out, to her, exactly what she needed to do so that everything worked as expected, and that she had been busy ignoring this safeguard, and that our product didn't kick up messages for the fun of it, etc...
I've even had the fun of having a user complain that they "aren't getting the latest features" of our product, only to find that when the update prompt came up, they were clicking "Cancel" without even reading the popup message.
I'm not saying that there aren't bugs that I find that are perfectly legit - but it's frustrating how many people assume that software will be sentient somehow and solve their problems for them, to the extent that they don't feel any need to pay attention to what's on the screen. They click OK, Cancel, red "X", or whatever to get the "annoying screen" out of their way so they can "get something done".
I've taken to kicking up windows that can't be dismissed unless they type some code, like: "I don't mind losing data" or "yes I want to delete this forever", or "I am liable for the information I'm about to lose". No, not that long, but you get the idea. If the end user can't dismiss the window without reading the message on it, maybe they'll read it.
Vista users are the worst - their O/S kicks up so many worthless messages they are truly desensitized to them.
Nowadays, I answer the phone politely but tersely, and I don't really bother to hide the fact that I have better things to do with my time. I go so far as to make sure that they have the right answer, then bail as quickly as I can without being openly rude./Shrug/
I've been "doing the zone" for years now. If anything, it's a combination of sensible diet and regular exercise that keeps me in the "borderline" part.
But truth be told? For some things, there just is no magical cure. (yet) No amount of careful eating and exercising will change the fact that, by the time I'm 50, I'll be a full-blown diabetic. I'm going to die, someday, too. In the meantime, I've already postponed the problem for over 10 years. Had I NOT changed my course pretty drastically, my blood sugar would average in the 200-300 range. As it is now, it's usually between 90 and 150.
Our testicles, for example, hang from our undersides dangerously exposed, just because some protein denatures at core body temperatures. Apparently something needs to be redesigned that can't be made to work better with slow incremental improvements. Evolution's fix: make them hurt like hell when struck so you learn not to mess with them. A Microsoft-style hack. If we threw a bunch of supercomputers at the problem we might come up with a completely different protein design that would allow reproduction with undescended testicles.
Which explains the survivability of so much hackish, clumsy, but real-working software. See, software, or life organisms persist to the degree that they solve real-world problems. How "elegant" the solution is is rather secondary. Often, real-world problems are ugly, pseudo-random nasty problems that don't have a clear, simple, ivory tower style solution. I maintain a large, complex, beautiful software codebase that has the ugliest, most horrible hack of a pile of regex and scripting as its very center. The nasty hacks have been amazingly stable for years now, and work well, even if they are a serious pain to edit during the (very rare) need to edit.
It's carefully sandboxed - the ugly part sits in a single file that is itself wrapped inside a handler function, so the "pretty" part of the codebase is *never* contaminated by the ugly, "written in a day or two" hack that got the whole shebang started.
Sometimes, no matter how much you kick and scream, you have several screens of ugly case statements littered with random function calls, and you end up with a great big ball of mud.
Guess what!?!?! Look in the mirror - YOU ARE A GREAT BIG BALL OF MUD. Your body is a complex set of unclear, un-abstracted dependencies without clear boundaries. For example, we've long thought of the pancreas as a key component of blood sugar control. But recent research shows that the bones (yes, bones!) of the body also contribute to positive blood-sugar control. As a borderline type-II diabetic, I pay attention to things like this...
Millions of years of evolution (or a few years of hard work by a half-drunk God) have resulted in your body, which is a festering pile of weird dependencies. For example, if you don't get exposed to enough dirt as a baby, you end up with asthma.
If Microsoft's software is truly evolutionary in nature, that would explain its dominance in today's marketplace - it's well adapted to survive in the software environment we've seen so far, and like the dinosaurs, it will only be beaten back when the basic environment changes. (which it is)
Get used to the world of "dirty" evolutionary solutions - it's the basic building block of life itself!
Sometimes, it seems, there are no new ideas. As others have said, what we have here is a glorified sail. Nothing wrong with that, but as fossil fuels become more expensive, we'll find more and more "old tech" make a comeback.
No, basic technologies are not new - what's new are refinements. For example, Linux is a re-implementation of a 35 year old Operating System having the chief innovation of a license change. I'm not knocking the quality that Linus has put into the Linux kernel, but Linux is written to be POSIX compliant, so while drivers are nice, Linux is basically no different than any other UNIX but for the license difference.
I guess what it comes down to is this: Technology is valuable when it works, not when it's complex. There's lots of very, very, very simple technology that nonetheless works very, very, very well.
Maybe I'm missing something, but couldn't you get equivalent results by using OpenOffice locally and having some sort of syncing online? Or maybe figuring out a way to mount a remote volume and open/save documents directly to it?
That's what really gets me: the technology to do this was old news in 1998. URL wrappers has been working well for eons. It would be *NOTHING* to include native support for webDAV style functionality into OpenOffice, (EG: you don't have to "mount" the DAV directory locally) and it seems that some effort to do this has already been undertaken - why hasn't this been brought up before???
Really, everything old is new again, and everything fresh is really very stale. (EG: Linux is a re-implementation of a 35+ year old Operating System, and the browser is a glorified dummy terminal, while Javascript is a return to Client-Server computing, of a sorts)
And now everyone believes XP is the second coming or something. Just hurts your head sometimes...
"Better than" does not mean "good".
If I said "grating off your forearm skin with a cheese grater is better than grating off your foreskin with said cheese grater", I wouldn't be implying that either are good. Much the same is going on. For all its warts, Windows XP was less sucktacular (new word, don't look it up) than Vista. Windows XP was only better than Windows 2000 in that it had/has good 3D support and support for games.
And yes, Windows 2000 was an awfully good Operating System which is why I still use it for business software application development. But even with that, I run Windows 2000 in a VMWare instance on my Fedora Core laptop, YMMV.
Personally, I like it and it didn't cost me anything. Plus, the fact that they got some record companies to agree to -anything- is great. Maybe they'll keep continuing to gain some sense.
You might consider Deezer.com as well. No ads, instant download, decent selection. I like it!
As a recently licensed FAA private pilot, I can only say: I wish I had the cajones this guy has. (my wife is glad I don't!) I've admired this video many times before, and just now, I enjoyed every second of it... yet again.
Flying is one of those things where, once you've tried sitting "front seat", you know right away if it's "in you" or not. About a year ago, I went on a "discovery flight" with my wife and youngest son. My response was immediate and absolute - I had to be a pilot! And, now I am, and I can say with certainty: I will die with a love for flying!
If you are curious, go to your local airport and risk $50. You'll either find that it wasn't for you, or you'll have one of the most incredible experiences of your life. You might not be the extreme hard-core nut-buster junkie that this guy is, but there's still lots of fun to be had buzzing around in a Cessna 172 or Piper Cherokee, too!
It's all a little dubious if you ask me. I always knew it was possible to fiddle with the stream, but I didn't think anyone would bother because it could possibly break a lot of pages that are held together with fragile HTML-fu.
If you want a complete, nearly 100% guarantee of clean, unmodified sessions, demand SSL. It's really, REALLY hard to beat SSL. But if you want a "poor-man's solution" better for everyday websites, demand DNSSEC - pay particular note to RFC 4398. We have the solutions to dirtbags like this, ahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNSSECnd if it becomes widespread, I have every confidence that solutions (such as DNSSEC) will be implemented quickly.
What good is freedom of expression if you can't be sure your expression is your own?
Problem solved, circa 1994. It's called "SSL", and it's amazing technology that provides very strong protection against spoofing, stream-slicing, man-in-the-middle attacks, and a host of other problems.
Using SSL means it's far more likely that the computers at either end of the connection will be compromised than the stream of data itself. Read up on it... it's pretty special!
Though, this is rarely a problem - if there was too much capacity at any time, they could offset the phase of a generator or two, causing one system to effectively cancel out the other, reducing system voltage. This is very strange concept for me. I don't see how power plants can cancel the power they pump into the system. Could you give me some links that explain this?
Your intuitive understanding of electricity applies to DC power. Your intuitive understanding is that power "flows" from the power plant to the power socket in your wall, much like water flows through a pipe. It "goes" from there to here, and you picture electrons like little balls or water drops or something like that.
Your intuitive understanding is wrong.
AC power, aka "Alternating Current" is just that - alternating. Instead of water flowing from the power plant to your house, think instead of a tight rope stretched from your power plant to your house that rocks back and forth, lengthwise. That's what it literally does, rocks back and forth at 60 cycles per second.
Voltage could be considered as the distance it moves when it rocks, Amperage could be considered as the thickness of the rope. (no, the analog is not perfect)
Let's say the rope is rocking too far, and you need to "slow it down" a little bit. You *could* have a few smaller plants rock 180 degrees out of time, AKA "out of phase" so that instead of working to exaggerate the rocking, they actually slow it down. That's what I meant by "offset the phase".
Give it some time - the concepts aren't difficult, just a little counter-intuitive.
This concept of "Base Load" gets bantied about, in (often) confusing and erroneous ways.
An electrical energy system has two values that are critical in preserving the integrity of the system.
1) "Base load" - the minimum amount of load the system can expect at any time. In short, there's *always* going to be this much or more energy produced at any given time. If you overproduce Base load you have rising voltages in the system and potentially cause problems. Though, this is rarely a problem - if there was too much capacity at any time, they could offset the phase of a generator or two, causing one system to effectively cancel out the other, reducing system voltage.
2) "Max load" - the maximum amount of load the system could generate at any time. If your usage exceeds max load, you have rolling brownouts or even blackouts.
Usually, the "Base load" is handled by slower-moving-but cheap power plants. A coal-fired plant can take an hour or more to change its output significantly, but it can produce electricity 24x7 at the cheapest possible cost. Thus it's a good candidate for "Base Load". But whatever solution is applied to base load, it must be very, very dependable.
However, the difference between Base load and Max load can be quite variable, changing significantly in mere minutes. This "Variable load" must be met in order to prevent voltage spikes and/or brownouts, and to handle this, you need power plants that can vary their output quickly, and on demand.
Notice that neither Wind or Solar energy can actually act as either Base or Variable loads. Yes, they add energy to the sytem, but they can't be considered "Base load" since their output varies. And they can't really be considered "Variable load" because their output varies with their wind-energy input, NOT because their output varies upon demand.
Thus, Wind/Solar can't really be used as EITHER base or "Variable" load. ALL of the output of either Solar or Wind energy must be matched by other variable load sources, so that when the wind isn't blowing and/or the sun not shining, the system as a whole can preserve its integrity. And this is the part that nobody discusses.
YES, you can get energy from the wind, or from solar panels. But it isn't reliable, so can't be used for "Base load", but it also isn't available "on demand" so it isn't useful for "Variable load".
Which brings me to my point: what if they used the wind energy to compress air that's otherwise stored on the ocean floor? All that nice, heavy water would avoid the need for high-pressure tanks, simply pushing the water out of the way would provide significant amounts of energy. And it would be useful for either base or variable loads, since the compressed air could be used to power generators on demand. Oh, and piping compressed air is a fairly lossless ordeal.
This is an old thread, hopefully you'll check your post history.
First off, let me start by saying I'm an avid aviation fan. I love flying, and am a private pilot with current medical. I fly (generally) a few times per month, in a rented Cessna 172.
You assume the aircraft has electrical power. I've got a 1962 Stitts that does not have an electrical system. You start it the old fashion way - spin the prop. Cost me ~6.5, with a couple thousand more in maintenance to fly a 100 hp, two seat, tail dragger that has its aerobatics rating.
Thanks for making my point. We have an ANCIENT fleet of airplanes, with an average age about as old as myself. (I'm 35) In 50 years there have been no great changes in aviation - somebody who flew a brand new 2007 Cessna would find that the original straightback from 1956 was largely unchanged, with some changes in the layout of the instruments. While there are cosmetic differences, there's virtually no significant change in the general operational characteristics, fuel economy, crash-survivability, or pilot visibility. They go about as fast, as far, with the same amount of gas, with the same performance and safety envelopes, as they ever did.
Compare that to my recent monologue, in particular comparing my Dad's late 1970's VW Rabbit against my late 1990's Saturn SL2. In many ways they are comparable cars for their day - midrange, 5 seat cars with good efficiency. If anything, the Saturn has LESS bend on efficiency than the original Rabbit. Yet on just about every metric, the Saturn bests the VW handily, sometimes shockingly, including fuel economy! Compare 20 years of advances in automotive technology to the ones you see in General Aviation in 50 years. It's a stark difference, especially if you look at price point.
Next time I resurface the wings, I'll probably run wiring for lights. I just cannot afford (weight) an alternator. The extras are nice - but the moment you buy anything 'aviation' grade, you tend to shell out 2-3 times what one would think you might pay.
Airplanes today are largely hand made. Even the certified ones from Cessna and Cirrus. You can't get the combination of consistency, quality, durability, and cost out of *anything* hand made that you can get out of some reasonable quality mass-production.
I'd reply back - why are bicyclist allowed to bike on a street without a drivers license? Why aren't all cars all wheel drive?
Probably because bikes don't weigh 2,500 pounds and travel at 130 MPH?
Just like a radio, in some conditions you don't need it. Flying is not so different from boating. Most areas follow some simple rules.
Cars don't always need headlights. But they all have them. They don't always need window defrosters, either. However, items that significantly improve safety are pretty much required. EG: brake lights, seat belts, crumple zones, etc. Even your boats require life vests for everybody. (In California, anyway) Ever wonder where the crumple zone is in your Stitts?
Personally, I have a Sporty's SP 200 that I ALWAYS carry on flights. I took it "just in case" on my first solo X-Country, and the radio died in my plane. Completely. Wow, did I appreciate having failover NAV/COM in my hand! I've never again flown without it and fresh batteries!
Compared to dash radios, it's small, light, and portable. It doesn't even require an electrical system in your Stitts. I'd strongly recommend it. Flying with a radio is night and day for situational awareness, particularly in even lightly packed airspace. Yet compared to the Razr cellphone in my pocket, it's large, bulky, and old-fashioned looking. The screen is a dim LCD, it uses 8 AA batteries to get just a dozen or so hours of battery life, and that's among the better battery life among full-strength handhelds.
The backup generators will probably not be very effective in preventing outages during natural disasters. Consider New Orleans: how many of generators can work while submerged underwater? Or California, where should an earthquake knock out the original power to a tower, it is just as likely to knock out the generator.
Consider... Backup power good for just 72 hours, (batteries, etc) and connections by directional microwave. (common) Most disasters are short-lived events. It only takes one cell tower to provide communication coverage for a few square miles. Imagine what having such a system, even in NOLA, could do. That's 3 days of backup power, providing much-needed information to emergency first-responders and/or military response units.
That's a big, big, big deal.
Oh, and your California example is just silly. You mean, that an earthquake is just as likely to destroy a pack of batteries in a shielded metal box as it is to topple any of the thousands of power line towers (think tall, spindly,) or trees near power lines? That's ridiculous, and I'm surprised you posted it.
What, for me, is surprising is that this wasn't already the case. This strikes me as so fundamental and so basic, and shows just how much profiteering is going on in the cellular industry. Despite having infrastructure investment costs orders of magnitude cheaper than copper, and a less-than-complete requirement for cellular coverage, (Can you hear me now, anyone?) I pay MORE for cellular than I do for land lines? That's just absurd...
- If the sudden popularity of compact fluorescent lightbulbs has just recently taken off and can make such a difference, as well as Walmart's push for concentrated laundry detergent, etc, etc, isn't this a sign that we have many, many more areas where efficiency improvements can be made. Lets look at trimming the waste.
Which brings up an interesting point... in the last 30 years, average energy usage per capita in the United States has dropped LOTS, something like 40%, with an associated INCREASE in the quality of life. And I see it every day, in a million little ways...
When I was a kid, we heated a mobile home "hot box" with a gas-based central heater, and cooled with the same central A/C. Today, in my home, we recently extended the house so that it's WAY bigger than the mobile home I grew up in, and I know that the dollar has inflated, that energy prices are much, much higher. Yet my monthly utility bill is about the same (in dollars) as my parents paid in 1980! (About $400/month)
So we have
A) Bigger house B) Weaker Dollar C) Higher-priced Energy D) BETTER comfort. E) Same price.
Oh, and my 5 passenger Saturn SL2 gets about the same gas mileage as my dad's VW Rabbit while being much safer, WAYYY faster, much better handling around corners and such, similar price range (for its time) and vastly more comfortable, too. Dual airbags, dual OHC, cruises all day long at 90 MPH while getting 30 MPG, the Rabbit barely held 80 to get about 25 MPG, or 33 MPG or so at 55. Oh, and one more thing: my Saturn is just now starting to get a bit "cranky" after being driven for 170,000 miles. Yes, you read that right.
And it's not like my almost-10-year-old Saturn is all that unique, today's cars are a fair notch better still. Have you looked at the latest Honda Accord Hybrid? That bastard is the FASTEST flavor of the Accord line, while simultaneously having the best fuel economy, though with the heftiest price tag. (BTW: I drove one, I love it!)
We've gotten lots, lots, lots better, faster, bigger, cheaper. Using CFL bulbs, I can light my whole (larger) house with less wattage than my daddy used to light up just one room. (I remember the dual 100-watt bulbs in the living room fixture, we now use two CFLs in my living room that use just 12 watts each) Further, although CFLs are more expensive than incandescent bulbs, they also last so much longer the higher upfront costs are made up with their longevity.
On, and on, and on, example after example. Cool, eh?
Also, Firefox doesn't come with a spell checker either.
I'm using Firefox 2.0.0.11 on an OSX Tiger Mac mini. If I type rediculous, I see a red line below the (non) word "rediculous". Whereas, if I spell it 'ridiculous', I see no red lines. So go pound sand. I see the same thing on my Fedora Core 6 laptop, and my Windows XP boxen.
It's an industry largely paralyzed by lawyers. Recently, the parents of a 1000-jump skydiver sued the aircraft manufacturer when the pilot flew the plane into icy clouds and crashed the plane because the wing de-icing equipment was overwhelmed. It's like suing Chrysler because the driver of the car drove it into a brick wall at 90 MPH, and the seat belts just weren't quite enough. Except in this case, Cessna will probably have to settle.
Private airplanes == Rich guys == $target.
As a result, nobody wants to develop any new technology because the technology, even if demonstrably safer, will still be sued if it should ever fail. (which it would, eventually)
If some kind of law was passed at the federal level so that aviation was held to sane liability standards, so that plane manufacturers actually had the free resources to develop better technology, then aviation would be more modern, cheaper, and safer for all.
Really, why is it OK for planes to fly without even having a radio? It's almost 2008, we should have planes with full, digital situational monitors that tell the pilot about any looming threats. If you spend $500,000, you can have that today, but it should be costing somewhere around a couple grand. Since the entry point for aviation is around $20,000 for a basic, 2-seat plane, this is a big deal.
If planes reliably had a situational-awareness monitor, UAVs would be a non-issue. We have the technology - your $300 Garmin has more than enough processing power for this and already has all the latitude/longitude/altitude information it needs to make this work.
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These people have never been to a Fry's. If you've never been to one, picture this: they sell porn and energy drinks within 20 feet of each other.
Obviously, you've never been to a Fry's, either. They have more than 50 feet of rechargeable batteries. The porn and the energy drinks, are, alas, some 170 yards apart in what appears to have once been an aircraft hangar for dirgibles.
I shop at Fry's, when I feel like walking an endurance walk-athon in order to get my $70 motherboard today rather than 3 days from now, at my doorstep. And if porn is what gets you to go, perhaps you might consider some alternatives?
PS: I've never used pornotube. I googled "youtube clone porn" and it came up. Truthfully, I don't care about porn - I'm happily married and nothing a porn video portrays compares to the real thing from a willing partner. But if that's your gig...
I strongly consider you to perform a modicum of research before you regurgitate knowledge you got at a party while partly intoxicated, and hoping to get that girl-in-the-green-dress' phone number.
Oh wait... do you get invited to those kinds of parties? Perhaps you think digital watches are a pretty cool idea?
I was on a railroad photographers' list for a while, and I remember the digital/analog debate came up one time. Someone said, "I'll be laughing when you lose all your files because your hard drive crashed and don't have pictures any more!" Obviously he never considered he could easily lose his negatives/slides, or have them damaged in a flood or fire. Analog media has different risks and storage requirements, but they BOTH require proper storage. (And, frankly, digital has the additional advantage that it can be easily backed up at multiple sites with no loss in quality.)
As somebody who's just had an important database server go down YESTERDAY due to a disk failure, I can assure you that, while photographs can be flooded out, or the building burned down, a HDD failure is LOTS AND LOTS more likely. So the guy has a point - unless you actually ARE taking advantage of the ability to copy to multiple sites...
We are so set up, so the database server going down resulted in about 20 minutes of partial downtime while we brought up a snapshot on a hot failover server. (which was already pre-imaged, configured, and ready to go as a "just in case")
I present to you, the rule of profanity: The use of profanity in any kind of prepared statement is proof positive of the weakness of the underlying argument.
It may or may not be true. But it's perceived as true by many, if not most, so it might as well be true. And in this case, poor Theo shot himself in the foot.
Profanity is used to add weight to a statement, but it's a very crude, rough kind of weight. As in "Oh shit, I've just been shot!" can be said by anybody, because being shot is, well, rough. But "shit" when talking about X86 code is just... quaint. And low brow. And self defeating.
Is the X86 instruction set weak? Yeah. Sure is. I won't argue that point. But the X86 instruction set has a strength that cannot be denied - it's compatible with a vast percentage of the software out there in the binary landscape. Everything from the flash player to freeDOS, all works with X86 first. It's an "upward spiral" where the mere inertia of the platform causes more people to jump on the bandwagon, which further increases the inertia, etc.
It's how ideological wars are won, and truth be told, X86 is an ideology as much as an engineering practice. X86 will continue to rule the day until the basic rules of computing change. This "sea change" will make X86 computing irrelevant, and there are already several things that might do this: Virtualization might be this. The Internet itself is a powerful driving force, since, with commodity exchange formats, the X86 platform offers reduced value. And finally, there's quantum computing out there, on the horizon.
But X86 has been actively developed for just shy of 30 years and the incredible investment in making it work, despite its warts, is high enough and profitable enough to nearly eliminate alternate platforms. AMD proved this with their Opteron processor, to replace X86 you first have to emulate it. Perfectly.
And I, myself, am an example of the strength of the X86 - I won't even consider anything but X86 for my servers - what I have works, and the perceived risk in going with anything else is greater than the relatively low, commodity cost of a new server. I can spend $2,500 on a nice, whitebox 1U Rackmount server and get all the bells and whistles, hundreds of GB of RAID 1 10K SCSI drives, 8 GB of ECC RAM, and 4 cores, each running at close to 3 Ghz.
That's an awful lot of power for the buck. Combined with reasonably well-designed software, and you have a mighty effective information processing tool that can single-handledly make hundreds, maybe thousands of users happy.
Short response:
Suck it, Theo!
They passed a law a few years ago saying that you have to report it to police if you find CP on someone's machine.
You know, ysnuae. (You Should Not Use Acronyms Excessively)
Because, "cp" is a commonly-used *nix command to copy files. It took me a few re-reads and a moment or two to realize that you probably mean "Child Porn". I almost skipped your post; next time, if you want to be read, take the extra 9 seconds it would take to move your pointer finger to the various keys and type the whole thing out!
It's so totally worth it!
Another great guy from Red Hat is Bob Young who went on to start LULU.com. This guy really groks the whole "open source" thing. Since I've built my million-dollar business on the back of RedHat Linux, I can say with complete honesty, I really appreciate their efforts!
AFAIK, when you turn information into your lawyer, it's protected by "client-attorney priviledge". Your attorney can know that you murdered somebody, and is under no obligation to tell anybody. (In fact, he/she could be sanctioned or disbarred if they DID tell anybody)
So, could you offer a bonded "secure" computer repair service through attorneys?
When it's a choice between that and your own urine, which has been reprocessed through the spaceship urine reprocessing system 700 times, the dirty ice will start to look mighty appealing.
The water that pours out of your sink has been urine so many times, it's impossible to count. There's clean water, and there's dirty water. Various processes clean water, (such as evaporation & condensation) and various processes dirty water (such as drinking it) but that's all there is.
I remember reading a thesis which asserted that nobody alive today can drink a glass of water that doesn't contain at least 1 molecule of water which was in one of the infamous baths of England's King Louis. It's a cycle. Just because modern technology shortens the cycle, doesn't mean the cycle isn't there in the first place.
Get over it.
This is really the worst part of modern software-development practices. When users complain about bugs, they are met with hostile demands to explain exactly, how to reproduce the bug, and the complainer is always presumed to be doing something wrong. Those, who aren't willing to put up with the hostility are not even deemed worthy of being a user -- if you had a bug, you should've reported it!
/Shrug/
Obviously, you aren't a developer. If you were, you'd know what they are dealing with.
You write some software, test it, and release it. You sink your heart and soul into it, you design it meticulously, and you are careful to leave the end-user in a position of strength - they can do whatever they want. You explain how to use it to the rest of your staff. They start training end users. Shortly, the calls start to flood back. How does NNN work? Why does "XXX" do that when you click on the button? And so on.
At first, you're all too happy to explain how NN feature works. But after a few years, while you're still explaining how feature NN works, you realize that you have documentation, notes on the website, an embedded help system, a features list, and a nice website that all explain the issue at hand.
You are willing to accomodate the fact that end users are not programmers. You ask for language, improvements, etc. that make it easier to understand what's going on.
But despite documentation and careful training, most calls I get are NOT bugs or problems, they are examples of the software doing exactly what it was supposed to do. I remember one support call I got that sounded like very serious data loss. The end-user denied seeing any error messages or anything by the program that would indicate any data loss. This end user went through several support staff before finally coming to me, the "chief tech weenie".
To avoid any ambiguity, I ran a Remote Desktop tool (VNC inside an NSIS installer) so that I could see what the end user was actually seeing. And right in the middle of the conversation, our software kicked up an error with a message that started with "PAY ATTENTION - YOU MIGHT LOSE DATA", which then explained the whole situation in pretty plain English. The end user was mid-sentence with me when this error popped up, and without skipping a beat, she clicked on the "ok" button. There was no pitch change, no pause, nothing in her voice. When I asked about the error message, she replied with "Oh, I see that all the time, and I just click OK".
So I had the fun of explaining to her that the message she hadn't bothered to read explained why she was losing data, and that the program had been laying out, to her, exactly what she needed to do so that everything worked as expected, and that she had been busy ignoring this safeguard, and that our product didn't kick up messages for the fun of it, etc...
I've even had the fun of having a user complain that they "aren't getting the latest features" of our product, only to find that when the update prompt came up, they were clicking "Cancel" without even reading the popup message.
I'm not saying that there aren't bugs that I find that are perfectly legit - but it's frustrating how many people assume that software will be sentient somehow and solve their problems for them, to the extent that they don't feel any need to pay attention to what's on the screen. They click OK, Cancel, red "X", or whatever to get the "annoying screen" out of their way so they can "get something done".
I've taken to kicking up windows that can't be dismissed unless they type some code, like: "I don't mind losing data" or "yes I want to delete this forever", or "I am liable for the information I'm about to lose". No, not that long, but you get the idea. If the end user can't dismiss the window without reading the message on it, maybe they'll read it.
Vista users are the worst - their O/S kicks up so many worthless messages they are truly desensitized to them.
Nowadays, I answer the phone politely but tersely, and I don't really bother to hide the fact that I have better things to do with my time. I go so far as to make sure that they have the right answer, then bail as quickly as I can without being openly rude.
I've been "doing the zone" for years now. If anything, it's a combination of sensible diet and regular exercise that keeps me in the "borderline" part.
But truth be told? For some things, there just is no magical cure. (yet) No amount of careful eating and exercising will change the fact that, by the time I'm 50, I'll be a full-blown diabetic. I'm going to die, someday, too. In the meantime, I've already postponed the problem for over 10 years. Had I NOT changed my course pretty drastically, my blood sugar would average in the 200-300 range. As it is now, it's usually between 90 and 150.
Thanks for the advice, though.
Our testicles, for example, hang from our undersides dangerously exposed, just because some protein denatures at core body temperatures. Apparently something needs to be redesigned that can't be made to work better with slow incremental improvements. Evolution's fix: make them hurt like hell when struck so you learn not to mess with them. A Microsoft-style hack. If we threw a bunch of supercomputers at the problem we might come up with a completely different protein design that would allow reproduction with undescended testicles.
Which explains the survivability of so much hackish, clumsy, but real-working software. See, software, or life organisms persist to the degree that they solve real-world problems. How "elegant" the solution is is rather secondary. Often, real-world problems are ugly, pseudo-random nasty problems that don't have a clear, simple, ivory tower style solution. I maintain a large, complex, beautiful software codebase that has the ugliest, most horrible hack of a pile of regex and scripting as its very center. The nasty hacks have been amazingly stable for years now, and work well, even if they are a serious pain to edit during the (very rare) need to edit.
It's carefully sandboxed - the ugly part sits in a single file that is itself wrapped inside a handler function, so the "pretty" part of the codebase is *never* contaminated by the ugly, "written in a day or two" hack that got the whole shebang started.
Sometimes, no matter how much you kick and scream, you have several screens of ugly case statements littered with random function calls, and you end up with a great big ball of mud.
Guess what!?!?! Look in the mirror - YOU ARE A GREAT BIG BALL OF MUD. Your body is a complex set of unclear, un-abstracted dependencies without clear boundaries. For example, we've long thought of the pancreas as a key component of blood sugar control. But recent research shows that the bones (yes, bones!) of the body also contribute to positive blood-sugar control. As a borderline type-II diabetic, I pay attention to things like this...
Millions of years of evolution (or a few years of hard work by a half-drunk God) have resulted in your body, which is a festering pile of weird dependencies. For example, if you don't get exposed to enough dirt as a baby, you end up with asthma.
If Microsoft's software is truly evolutionary in nature, that would explain its dominance in today's marketplace - it's well adapted to survive in the software environment we've seen so far, and like the dinosaurs, it will only be beaten back when the basic environment changes. (which it is)
Get used to the world of "dirty" evolutionary solutions - it's the basic building block of life itself!
Sometimes, it seems, there are no new ideas. As others have said, what we have here is a glorified sail. Nothing wrong with that, but as fossil fuels become more expensive, we'll find more and more "old tech" make a comeback.
The biggest deal in alternative energy right now is the windmill, which have been used for what, 1,200 years? Now we have a (gasp!) sailing ship! Pretty soon we'll go back to using the electric car which was very popular in the early days of the automobile.
No, basic technologies are not new - what's new are refinements. For example, Linux is a re-implementation of a 35 year old Operating System having the chief innovation of a license change. I'm not knocking the quality that Linus has put into the Linux kernel, but Linux is written to be POSIX compliant, so while drivers are nice, Linux is basically no different than any other UNIX but for the license difference.
Innovation can come from some incredibly low-tech, unlikely places. For example, this guy has won numerous awards for sticking a pot inside a pot and filling the middle with wet sand - managing to solve a serious problem in Africa for low-cost refrigeration.
I guess what it comes down to is this: Technology is valuable when it works, not when it's complex. There's lots of very, very, very simple technology that nonetheless works very, very, very well.
Maybe I'm missing something, but couldn't you get equivalent results by using OpenOffice locally and having some sort of syncing online? Or maybe figuring out a way to mount a remote volume and open/save documents directly to it?
That's what really gets me: the technology to do this was old news in 1998. URL wrappers has been working well for eons. It would be *NOTHING* to include native support for webDAV style functionality into OpenOffice, (EG: you don't have to "mount" the DAV directory locally) and it seems that some effort to do this has already been undertaken - why hasn't this been brought up before???
Really, everything old is new again, and everything fresh is really very stale. (EG: Linux is a re-implementation of a 35+ year old Operating System, and the browser is a glorified dummy terminal, while Javascript is a return to Client-Server computing, of a sorts)
And now everyone believes XP is the second coming or something. Just hurts your head sometimes...
"Better than" does not mean "good".
If I said "grating off your forearm skin with a cheese grater is better than grating off your foreskin with said cheese grater", I wouldn't be implying that either are good. Much the same is going on. For all its warts, Windows XP was less sucktacular (new word, don't look it up) than Vista. Windows XP was only better than Windows 2000 in that it had/has good 3D support and support for games.
And yes, Windows 2000 was an awfully good Operating System which is why I still use it for business software application development. But even with that, I run Windows 2000 in a VMWare instance on my Fedora Core laptop, YMMV.
Personally, I like it and it didn't cost me anything. Plus, the fact that they got some record companies to agree to -anything- is great. Maybe they'll keep continuing to gain some sense.
You might consider Deezer.com as well. No ads, instant download, decent selection. I like it!
As a recently licensed FAA private pilot, I can only say: I wish I had the cajones this guy has. (my wife is glad I don't!) I've admired this video many times before, and just now, I enjoyed every second of it... yet again.
Flying is one of those things where, once you've tried sitting "front seat", you know right away if it's "in you" or not. About a year ago, I went on a "discovery flight" with my wife and youngest son. My response was immediate and absolute - I had to be a pilot! And, now I am, and I can say with certainty: I will die with a love for flying!
If you are curious, go to your local airport and risk $50. You'll either find that it wasn't for you, or you'll have one of the most incredible experiences of your life. You might not be the extreme hard-core nut-buster junkie that this guy is, but there's still lots of fun to be had buzzing around in a Cessna 172 or Piper Cherokee, too!
It's all a little dubious if you ask me. I always knew it was possible to fiddle with the stream, but I didn't think anyone would bother because it could possibly break a lot of pages that are held together with fragile HTML-fu.
If you want a complete, nearly 100% guarantee of clean, unmodified sessions, demand SSL. It's really, REALLY hard to beat SSL. But if you want a "poor-man's solution" better for everyday websites, demand DNSSEC - pay particular note to RFC 4398. We have the solutions to dirtbags like this, ahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNSSECnd if it becomes widespread, I have every confidence that solutions (such as DNSSEC) will be implemented quickly.
What good is freedom of expression if you can't be sure your expression is your own?
Problem solved, circa 1994. It's called "SSL", and it's amazing technology that provides very strong protection against spoofing, stream-slicing, man-in-the-middle attacks, and a host of other problems.
Using SSL means it's far more likely that the computers at either end of the connection will be compromised than the stream of data itself. Read up on it... it's pretty special!
Your intuitive understanding of electricity applies to DC power. Your intuitive understanding is that power "flows" from the power plant to the power socket in your wall, much like water flows through a pipe. It "goes" from there to here, and you picture electrons like little balls or water drops or something like that.
Your intuitive understanding is wrong.
AC power, aka "Alternating Current" is just that - alternating. Instead of water flowing from the power plant to your house, think instead of a tight rope stretched from your power plant to your house that rocks back and forth, lengthwise. That's what it literally does, rocks back and forth at 60 cycles per second.
I tried to find links, this is the closest I could get to something that explains this.
Voltage could be considered as the distance it moves when it rocks, Amperage could be considered as the thickness of the rope. (no, the analog is not perfect)
Let's say the rope is rocking too far, and you need to "slow it down" a little bit. You *could* have a few smaller plants rock 180 degrees out of time, AKA "out of phase" so that instead of working to exaggerate the rocking, they actually slow it down. That's what I meant by "offset the phase".
Give it some time - the concepts aren't difficult, just a little counter-intuitive.
This concept of "Base Load" gets bantied about, in (often) confusing and erroneous ways.
An electrical energy system has two values that are critical in preserving the integrity of the system.
1) "Base load" - the minimum amount of load the system can expect at any time. In short, there's *always* going to be this much or more energy produced at any given time. If you overproduce Base load you have rising voltages in the system and potentially cause problems. Though, this is rarely a problem - if there was too much capacity at any time, they could offset the phase of a generator or two, causing one system to effectively cancel out the other, reducing system voltage.
2) "Max load" - the maximum amount of load the system could generate at any time. If your usage exceeds max load, you have rolling brownouts or even blackouts.
Usually, the "Base load" is handled by slower-moving-but cheap power plants. A coal-fired plant can take an hour or more to change its output significantly, but it can produce electricity 24x7 at the cheapest possible cost. Thus it's a good candidate for "Base Load". But whatever solution is applied to base load, it must be very, very dependable.
However, the difference between Base load and Max load can be quite variable, changing significantly in mere minutes. This "Variable load" must be met in order to prevent voltage spikes and/or brownouts, and to handle this, you need power plants that can vary their output quickly, and on demand.
Notice that neither Wind or Solar energy can actually act as either Base or Variable loads. Yes, they add energy to the sytem, but they can't be considered "Base load" since their output varies. And they can't really be considered "Variable load" because their output varies with their wind-energy input, NOT because their output varies upon demand.
Thus, Wind/Solar can't really be used as EITHER base or "Variable" load. ALL of the output of either Solar or Wind energy must be matched by other variable load sources, so that when the wind isn't blowing and/or the sun not shining, the system as a whole can preserve its integrity. And this is the part that nobody discusses.
YES, you can get energy from the wind, or from solar panels. But it isn't reliable, so can't be used for "Base load", but it also isn't available "on demand" so it isn't useful for "Variable load".
Which brings me to my point: what if they used the wind energy to compress air that's otherwise stored on the ocean floor? All that nice, heavy water would avoid the need for high-pressure tanks, simply pushing the water out of the way would provide significant amounts of energy. And it would be useful for either base or variable loads, since the compressed air could be used to power generators on demand. Oh, and piping compressed air is a fairly lossless ordeal.
Why not?
Why not?
This is an old thread, hopefully you'll check your post history.
First off, let me start by saying I'm an avid aviation fan. I love flying, and am a private pilot with current medical. I fly (generally) a few times per month, in a rented Cessna 172.
You assume the aircraft has electrical power. I've got a 1962 Stitts that does not have an electrical system. You start it the old fashion way - spin the prop. Cost me ~6.5, with a couple thousand more in maintenance to fly a 100 hp, two seat, tail dragger that has its aerobatics rating.
Thanks for making my point. We have an ANCIENT fleet of airplanes, with an average age about as old as myself. (I'm 35) In 50 years there have been no great changes in aviation - somebody who flew a brand new 2007 Cessna would find that the original straightback from 1956 was largely unchanged, with some changes in the layout of the instruments. While there are cosmetic differences, there's virtually no significant change in the general operational characteristics, fuel economy, crash-survivability, or pilot visibility. They go about as fast, as far, with the same amount of gas, with the same performance and safety envelopes, as they ever did.
Compare that to my recent monologue, in particular comparing my Dad's late 1970's VW Rabbit against my late 1990's Saturn SL2. In many ways they are comparable cars for their day - midrange, 5 seat cars with good efficiency. If anything, the Saturn has LESS bend on efficiency than the original Rabbit. Yet on just about every metric, the Saturn bests the VW handily, sometimes shockingly, including fuel economy! Compare 20 years of advances in automotive technology to the ones you see in General Aviation in 50 years. It's a stark difference, especially if you look at price point.
Next time I resurface the wings, I'll probably run wiring for lights. I just cannot afford (weight) an alternator. The extras are nice - but the moment you buy anything 'aviation' grade, you tend to shell out 2-3 times what one would think you might pay.
Airplanes today are largely hand made. Even the certified ones from Cessna and Cirrus. You can't get the combination of consistency, quality, durability, and cost out of *anything* hand made that you can get out of some reasonable quality mass-production.
I'd reply back - why are bicyclist allowed to bike on a street without a drivers license? Why aren't all cars all wheel drive?
Probably because bikes don't weigh 2,500 pounds and travel at 130 MPH?
Just like a radio, in some conditions you don't need it. Flying is not so different from boating. Most areas follow some simple rules.
Cars don't always need headlights. But they all have them. They don't always need window defrosters, either. However, items that significantly improve safety are pretty much required. EG: brake lights, seat belts, crumple zones, etc. Even your boats require life vests for everybody. (In California, anyway) Ever wonder where the crumple zone is in your Stitts?
Personally, I have a Sporty's SP 200 that I ALWAYS carry on flights. I took it "just in case" on my first solo X-Country, and the radio died in my plane. Completely. Wow, did I appreciate having failover NAV/COM in my hand! I've never again flown without it and fresh batteries!
Compared to dash radios, it's small, light, and portable. It doesn't even require an electrical system in your Stitts. I'd strongly recommend it. Flying with a radio is night and day for situational awareness, particularly in even lightly packed airspace. Yet compared to the Razr cellphone in my pocket, it's large, bulky, and old-fashioned looking. The screen is a dim LCD, it uses 8 AA batteries to get just a dozen or so hours of battery life, and that's among the better battery life among full-strength handhelds.
Of course, the Int
The backup generators will probably not be very effective in preventing outages during natural disasters. Consider New Orleans: how many of generators can work while submerged underwater? Or California, where should an earthquake knock out the original power to a tower, it is just as likely to knock out the generator.
Consider... Backup power good for just 72 hours, (batteries, etc) and connections by directional microwave. (common) Most disasters are short-lived events. It only takes one cell tower to provide communication coverage for a few square miles. Imagine what having such a system, even in NOLA, could do. That's 3 days of backup power, providing much-needed information to emergency first-responders and/or military response units.
That's a big, big, big deal.
Oh, and your California example is just silly. You mean, that an earthquake is just as likely to destroy a pack of batteries in a shielded metal box as it is to topple any of the thousands of power line towers (think tall, spindly,) or trees near power lines? That's ridiculous, and I'm surprised you posted it.
What, for me, is surprising is that this wasn't already the case. This strikes me as so fundamental and so basic, and shows just how much profiteering is going on in the cellular industry. Despite having infrastructure investment costs orders of magnitude cheaper than copper, and a less-than-complete requirement for cellular coverage, (Can you hear me now, anyone?) I pay MORE for cellular than I do for land lines? That's just absurd...
- If the sudden popularity of compact fluorescent lightbulbs has just recently taken off and can make such a difference, as well as Walmart's push for concentrated laundry detergent, etc, etc, isn't this a sign that we have many, many more areas where efficiency improvements can be made. Lets look at trimming the waste.
Which brings up an interesting point... in the last 30 years, average energy usage per capita in the United States has dropped LOTS, something like 40%, with an associated INCREASE in the quality of life. And I see it every day, in a million little ways...
When I was a kid, we heated a mobile home "hot box" with a gas-based central heater, and cooled with the same central A/C. Today, in my home, we recently extended the house so that it's WAY bigger than the mobile home I grew up in, and I know that the dollar has inflated, that energy prices are much, much higher. Yet my monthly utility bill is about the same (in dollars) as my parents paid in 1980! (About $400/month)
So we have
A) Bigger house
B) Weaker Dollar
C) Higher-priced Energy
D) BETTER comfort.
E) Same price.
Oh, and my 5 passenger Saturn SL2 gets about the same gas mileage as my dad's VW Rabbit while being much safer, WAYYY faster, much better handling around corners and such, similar price range (for its time) and vastly more comfortable, too. Dual airbags, dual OHC, cruises all day long at 90 MPH while getting 30 MPG, the Rabbit barely held 80 to get about 25 MPG, or 33 MPG or so at 55. Oh, and one more thing: my Saturn is just now starting to get a bit "cranky" after being driven for 170,000 miles. Yes, you read that right.
And it's not like my almost-10-year-old Saturn is all that unique, today's cars are a fair notch better still. Have you looked at the latest Honda Accord Hybrid? That bastard is the FASTEST flavor of the Accord line, while simultaneously having the best fuel economy, though with the heftiest price tag. (BTW: I drove one, I love it!)
We've gotten lots, lots, lots better, faster, bigger, cheaper. Using CFL bulbs, I can light my whole (larger) house with less wattage than my daddy used to light up just one room. (I remember the dual 100-watt bulbs in the living room fixture, we now use two CFLs in my living room that use just 12 watts each) Further, although CFLs are more expensive than incandescent bulbs, they also last so much longer the higher upfront costs are made up with their longevity.
On, and on, and on, example after example. Cool, eh?
Also, Firefox doesn't come with a spell checker either.
I'm using Firefox 2.0.0.11 on an OSX Tiger Mac mini. If I type rediculous, I see a red line below the (non) word "rediculous". Whereas, if I spell it 'ridiculous', I see no red lines. So go pound sand. I see the same thing on my Fedora Core 6 laptop, and my Windows XP boxen.
(and yes, boxen has a red line under it, too!)
You do realize that, to fly an airplane, it's not even a requirement to have a radio?
General aviation is a strange economic fluke - it's a cesspool like backwater of technology, seemingly frozen at its hey day in 1950 or so. The most popular plane flown today is largely identical to its 1956 ancestor - the only real difference is in the instruments on the panel, and even then, most planes are sold with classic "steam guage" instrumentation. Changes to the airframe and body are mostly cosmetic.
It's an industry largely paralyzed by lawyers. Recently, the parents of a 1000-jump skydiver sued the aircraft manufacturer when the pilot flew the plane into icy clouds and crashed the plane because the wing de-icing equipment was overwhelmed. It's like suing Chrysler because the driver of the car drove it into a brick wall at 90 MPH, and the seat belts just weren't quite enough. Except in this case, Cessna will probably have to settle.
Private airplanes == Rich guys == $target.
As a result, nobody wants to develop any new technology because the technology, even if demonstrably safer, will still be sued if it should ever fail. (which it would, eventually)
If some kind of law was passed at the federal level so that aviation was held to sane liability standards, so that plane manufacturers actually had the free resources to develop better technology, then aviation would be more modern, cheaper, and safer for all.
Really, why is it OK for planes to fly without even having a radio? It's almost 2008, we should have planes with full, digital situational monitors that tell the pilot about any looming threats. If you spend $500,000, you can have that today, but it should be costing somewhere around a couple grand. Since the entry point for aviation is around $20,000 for a basic, 2-seat plane, this is a big deal.
If planes reliably had a situational-awareness monitor, UAVs would be a non-issue. We have the technology - your $300 Garmin has more than enough processing power for this and already has all the latitude/longitude/altitude information it needs to make this work.
So, why not?