I suspect that Sears may be close to a franchise, with different managers given a relatively free hand in setting policy. The local Sears used to be pretty good, but a few years ago it underwent a severe change (can't say whether quickly or not...I didn't shop there that often). Now...
Now the employees look unhappy. The selection of goods is abysmal. The service is terrible. And I haven't gone back there in quite awhile. I shop, occasionally, at one 50 miles further away (which gives me a choice of two, and they're both pretty good). And at the Kenmore repair center the last time I called the people I dealt with seemed friendly and helpful. You don't get that when the employees are unhappy.
OTOH,I've been in several branches of Sears in different cities which I would not choose to revisit. And others that were good to decent. (I've never seen a Sears that I would call excellent.)
So... I believe BOTH of your stories, and suspect that they were typical of the local environment, but not of the chain, which doesn't seem to have a consistent environment.
I don't think you understand. You can't readily leave a contract with a studio. And while they'll make lavish projections of the profits ahead of you, they rarely pay off on those promises. *Very* rare is the artist who manages to get his auditor to go over their books. In every such case that I've heard of, the studios have been cooking the books.
Cooking the books might be an overstatement. Sometimes I believe that they used vague language that lent itself to an interpretation favorable to the artist, but legally could be interpreted in the way that the studios were doing. (But this wasn't always the case. In most of the cases that I've heard of the studios were found at fault. I never heard that this lead to criminal charges, though it clearly should have.)
PT Barnum said "There's a sucker born every minute". I doubt this has changed. I suspect that the studios can still find a large crop of names to select from. And it's not clear that the best musicians will have the clearest understanding of what it means to be signed to a studio. (Evidence appears to indicate otherwise.)
However! Several years ago I read a story about how the "modern studio" preferred to NOT sign on talented musicians, because they could become difficult to handle after they had become famous. They preferred people who were of mediocre talent, and could more easily be controlled. Musicians the quality of whose performance depended on the support of the studio.
If this is still true...then it becomes quite probable that the best musicians will never sign with the RIAA studios. And this *isn't* because the RIAA is evil, it's because the studios have intentionally decided to avoid talented musicians. (Which is more stupid than evil.)
What you say *sounds* reasonable. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to match the facts.
The most common profile of a terrorist, according to the research reports that I've seen, is a moderately wealthy, relatively successful, young male. Much like many of the civil rights activists in the US during the 1960's & 70's. So they probably have the same reasons. They are angered by the injustice that they have seen (or believed reports of) done to others.
This makes the problem more difficult. The question becomes: "How do you prevent these people from becoming violent?" During the 1960's Martin Luther King desired to avoid violence, in the Ghandian mode. He was largely successful. If he had encouraged violence, would violence have resulted? Naturally. To what extent? I don't know. How much would that have decreased his following? That depends on innumerable details. I know less about Nelson Mandela, but if anything his success was even greater (I'll grant that he built on MLK, as MLK built on Ghandi.) But that's peaceful resolution because of a decision made by the leadership (and, necessarily, supported by the followers).
I don't have an answer, but the obvious approaches don't seem to work. OTOH, image clearly plays a large part here. As the US is perceived as inherently more violent (and more accessible), more groups focus the anger of their members upon the US. The Romans had a kind of an answer to this, but it's not one that we would consider very civilized. They were either excessively brutal or excessively generous...and they were never generous twice. If they were brutal, there wouldn't be a twice. They'd do things like cutting off the right hand of every male in the tribe. (There *may* have been a cut-off age, but these things weren't formalized. The details were left up to the judgment of the local "generals".) N.B.: They were also equally brutal internally. Crucifixion wasn't their worst punishment. That was "generally rather quick" meaning only a few days, and less if the soldiers were in a hurry to leave. (They'd break the leg bones and allow a quick death through loss of blood.)
Somehow I don't think that's a desirable direction for our society to head.
OK. Maybe you need three systems, but two can be run under emulation (the MSWind97 and, say, XP, to act as a translator). As for documents...last time I used MSOffice it allowed one to save to several prior versions. Admittedly that was nearing a decade ago now, so it may no longer be true.
As for "copy into past"...??? I have no idea what that means. Possibly the same thing.
Also...borks the formatting? Well, yes, it does. In my experience nearly anything you do with an MSOffice document either borks the formatting, or just makes it unreadable. PDF is much more reliable for fixed documents, and if it's live, why lumber it with MSOffice formats? (Yes, I know "Management has decided that...", and you have to live with it. There's no earthly reason to defend it.)
Also, in case it wasn't obvious, I was proposing a "solution" that would have "sort of" worked...and would have been terrible to use. It was a *joke*! While MS has its face set against interoperable systems, any such are going to be kludges that will only work until MS notices them. The only real solution is to segregate MS to a separate network partition, and only allow interchange of documents whose documentation is adequate and accessible (I didn't say open, because I'm including PDF, and I think Adobe holds rights that prevent it from being truly open...though I'm not certain. And I'm including a large subset of rdf. [I know MS didn't open it, but much of how it works is known, and that subset is allowable...unless there are patents that I don't know about.]) This would be a "pretty good" solution. MSOffice can write pdf files (with a third party extension), and I understand that on Linux pdf files can be edited with pdfedit, though I've never tried. And in the case of MS, I feel that a 3rd party extension is likely to write cleaner code than the obfuscated code that MS would feel obliged to create.
That said, pdf files are hardly ideal for dynamic documents. ODF (odt?) files are far superior in that context. And anyone can download OpenOffice for free, so there's no argument about cost. Expecting OOo files to be able to reproduce exactly what's in an MSOffice document is absurd. If they could do it, MS would change their programs so that they no longer could, so it's a silly race to get into. Get close enough to handle 95%, perhaps. If MS munges things up too much they'll acutally manage to infuriate their own customers. (It's difficult. Anyone who voluntarily sticks with MS must either not know that there are alternatives, or must be a masochist. [OTOH, it's been nearly a decade since I used MS systems...I may possibly be out of date. But I don't believe it.])
Did my years of using MS software leave me ill-disposed towards them? Well, when I started using them I was very favorably disposed towards them. And I have a tendency towards nostalgia. So perhaps there were a few reasons. I would not trust them with a plugged nickel...and a nickel is worth a lot less now than when that phrase was coined.
But what about areas with poor signal quality? I live in an urban valley. I might be able to get a zoning variance to put up a tall antenna, but it's not certain. Rabbit ears suffice at the moment, but the signal quality is poor enough that digital equipment will reputedly not provide ANY visual image. And we don't watch enough TV to warrant cable. (Personally, I haven't watched a single show in the past 3 years, and my wife hasn't seen one in a year or so. Some furniture would need to be re-arranged.)
My guess is that we will just totally quit watching TV. Either that, or I'll get so fed up with my ADSL service that I'll switch to a cable for internet connection, and get cable for TV as a bonus.
What you do is you have two systems. One MSWind97 (that sounds wrong!) and the other whatever the current version is. You work on the MSWind97 system and do translations on the current system. You send the translations over a network from the current MSWind system to the working one.
The problem here is that old MS systems don't recognize modern hardware. So you'll need to be running it under emulation. To control expenses, you want a free system to run you emulated system under. As time goes one you may eventually need to be running nested levels of emulation, as, e.g., modern emulators emulate hardware that MSWind95 doesn't recognize. The last time I checked there was still a work around, but I haven't tried to reinstall MSWind95 recently.
The problem is that not only do social norms exist, but so the "the morals I want everyone else to have". And so do "The moral opinions about other people having a good time while I'm stuck at work."
And they aren't the same as the morals by which most people live their lives. Or should be forced to live their lives.
...They're not saying "act the way we want you to". They're saying "don't act in a way that will make our customers leave us".
I'd be less than certain about that. I'll grant that some are acting as you describe. Perhaps the majority. But it's certainly not unknown for corporations to have rules that enforce on the employees the morals that their bosses want them to have. It's happened frequently in the past, so I'd be surprised if it weren't happening now.
Well, *one* of the reasons that I don't have flash installed is because I consider it insecure. The EULA is another. There might be others, but those two are sufficient, so I haven't considered further.
OTOH, any particular distribution *could* eliminate duplicative packages. Some have. Most of the ones that have gone down that route are dead. (I'm not aware of any live exceptions, but I only know a few distros.)
OTOH!! At one time Gnome had Introductory, Medium complexity, Advanced options. At the introductory level one was given a pared down list of packages, and a simplified menu system. Then Gnome2 was introduced, and all that went away. At the same time that KDE was becoming more open (i.e., adopting the GPL) Gnome was becoming less configurable. I no longer use Gnome, except sometimes. (I've got a couple of alternate desktops installed that I check when I'm experiencing problems that might be KDE relates. Sometimes they are, and I'll switch over for a few days, until updates fix the problem. [I'm running Debian testing, so occasional breakages are expectable...but this doesn't mean that I'll always be able to identify the problem. The last one turned out to be {I think!} fixed by an update to libssl. I had not clue.])
Noob friendly... To me how friendly a system is shows most clearly in how it handles errors. Linux does rather poorly here. Mac does fairly well (i.e., better than any other system I know of). MSWind...sorry, my latest info is from MSWind2000. (And, at work, I refused to install it, and had someone else do the job...after getting as far as the EULA. The company lawyer refused to take the terms of the EULA seriously, but understood [sort of] when I did.)
Now I run Linux. BSD would be an option. Apple would have been an option until last year, when they added that "We have the right to add, modify, copy, or remove any file on your computer" to their EULA. Since then I've recommended disconnecting Macs from the internet and not upgrading. (Nobody pays attention, but I call them as I see them.)
OTOH, your reaction WRT the iBook seems an overreaction. Debian installs just fine on the Mac Notebook, and I presume that it would install without problems on the iBook. (Apple generally makes *very* good hardware. I'm less impressed with their software, but I'm not their target audience.)
Well, if you're generating solar power, and transmitting it at night...
You probably have some other scenario in mind, but it's not clear what. Nuclear? Coal? Transmission is only a part of the problem. But if you're doing long distance transmission, then generation has to be cheap enough to permit the extravagant transmission losses...though some have called into question precisely where in the transmission those losses happen. If it's not in the transmission itself, but in one of the conversion steps, perhaps it's at least partially soluble.
(I really *like* the idea of Solar Space Power Satellites. I'm not sure it's practical, but if so then it might also fit into your proposed scenario.)
That's simple, you just use the month as a decimal version...07.10 for example. You could write it 2007-10 or 7.10 or 7/Oct. They'd all mean the same thing.
And if you have two releases in the same month (say an important bug fix) you could have 2007.12.07 & 2007.12.09. If you need tighter specs you could even append hour, minute, and millisecond (UTC, of course), but that seems rather silly for a public release.
But the power comes from turning potential energy into kinetic energy into electric energy. You don't need the lake for that. One tall pipe will do, with an input at the top and an outflow at the bottom. The lake is for power storage...but that doesn't take much depth. The deep parts of the lake aren't energetically useful.
Still, it *will* start to require continual maintenance. Either that, or you build the dam higher (and plug any gaps in it's surroundings). The second choice may not be feasible, and that would mean dredging every year or so.
Well, since solar cells seem headed toward cheap/KWH (rivaling coal, according to the PR), electricity prices should soon become independent of oil prices. Soon might, however, mean a few decades.
If it works out that way, then SUVs will continue to be reasonable. If it doesn't... Toshiba is selling small nuclear plants. Use one to charge your SUV...but you'll need one near your house. (Line losses are HUGE! Only cheap generation makes long distance transmission at all practical.) The Toshiba plant is SMALL. If everyone is driving SUVs and towing boats, you might need one per block, or at least one every eight blocks. It depends on block-size, of course, but they wouldn't be 10's of miles away.
Otherwise you're depending on the grid...and it wasn't designed to transmit the kind of power that you're talking about, so you're talking about rebuilding it. And that means LOTS of money, so the prices go up, and up.
We'd best hope for cheap solar cells...and expect a tumultuous and unpleasant time until they start arriving in quantity. Fortunately, it looks like the price / kwh for solar cells is already decreasing to the point where they are practical. This means that it may just be a matter of production and tweaking. If so, then cheap solar power might arrive at the same time as the conversion of lots of transport from gas to electric. I'm not sanguine about multi-story buildings producing enough electric power to power themselves, but single family homes might have an excess. Water tanks and reservoirs could be shaded, etc. This should result in a minimal amount of electricity that would need to come in from external sources via the grid.
Or course, storing solar energy is always a problem, but the same batteries and super-capacitors that have been developed for the electric cars should do double duty here. (If not the same ones, then at least the same technology.)
In the long term, things are looking quite hopeful. The transition looks a bit rocky. Just *how* hopeful the long term is depends on how well the current developments in solar cells pan out. This is speculative. We know for sure that it doesn't need to be twice the current price. Hopeful estimates put it at "cheaper than coal". More probable is somewhere in between. All of these are endurable, but perhaps not with SUVs. It depends on just how successful various technologies are. (Various, not just one. A really good super capacitor could do a lot to make up for rather poor developments in solar cells.)
If we're only considering generalized heating, then you're probably correct. Localized heating is a very different matter.
I believe that there has been speculation about massive releases in the past, and that some of the proposed causes had to do with vulcanism. An active eruption wouldn't be necessary to warm a fairly large area by 16C.
And, of course, meteor strikes on the sea bed could also have this effect. So could certain actions by people. We might want to be careful as to just where we dump heat into the oceans. (Some electrical generating plants are proposing to do this in an ongoing manner, which could slowly heat a rather large area. The question might be how slow is required to allow the heat to safely disperse. And they *might* already be considering the stability and locations of cathlates...or they might not.)
But do you also remember just how big and fragile that resulting application was? I never found a single worthwhile use for it because of that, even though is *should* have been quite useful. I ended up requiring my clients to buy their own copies of MSAccess (of a specified edition, because only some versions would work). Needless to say I fled MSAccess as quickly as I was able, It was the print reporting capabilities that made this a difficult process. (These days I'd probably just generate HTML, but that wasn't acceptable at the time.)
What I wrote was because of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-14 Where it wrote: Carbon-14 is produced in the upper layers of the troposphere and the stratosphere by thermal neutrons absorbed by nitrogen atoms.
Probably that's technically correct, and I misinterpreted it, and I certainly couldn't correct it. It would probably be desirable if it were fixed so that it didn't seem to say... well, hot neutrons. I suppose they are, indeed, hot, but if they're at energies higher than the equivalent of having been excited by an infra-red photon, it seems like it should be said differently.
P.S.: Thermal radiation is also lower than visible light. (Per Wikipedia, or possibly Wikibooks. "Thermal solar radiation is probably the major source"etc. paraphrase.) You don't need to get up to the level of visible light to get nitrogen to convert to carbon. It's just quite improbable. I haven't calculated how many microwave photons you would need, but I'd be surprised if it took a thousand. It would still be an improbable conversion, so you're multiplying improbabilities, but possible...I think so. (Significant, not hardly!)
P.P.S: Read over again the great-grandfather post. "So, nuclear has a radioactivity issue. So does sunlight, microwave ovens, televisions, coal burning, X-Rays, and many more items/activities in daily life." Solar *does* have an issue. (Microwave may or may not.) It's not significant, but it has one. And yes, I've already admitted I was being nitpicky. A more serious response would have noted that coal has a more significant radiation hazard...even so, it's other issues are much worse.
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I suspect that Sears may be close to a franchise, with different managers given a relatively free hand in setting policy. The local Sears used to be pretty good, but a few years ago it underwent a severe change (can't say whether quickly or not...I didn't shop there that often). Now...
Now the employees look unhappy. The selection of goods is abysmal. The service is terrible. And I haven't gone back there in quite awhile. I shop, occasionally, at one 50 miles further away (which gives me a choice of two, and they're both pretty good). And at the Kenmore repair center the last time I called the people I dealt with seemed friendly and helpful. You don't get that when the employees are unhappy.
OTOH,I've been in several branches of Sears in different cities which I would not choose to revisit. And others that were good to decent. (I've never seen a Sears that I would call excellent.)
So... I believe BOTH of your stories, and suspect that they were typical of the local environment, but not of the chain, which doesn't seem to have a consistent environment.
I don't think you understand. You can't readily leave a contract with a studio. And while they'll make lavish projections of the profits ahead of you, they rarely pay off on those promises. *Very* rare is the artist who manages to get his auditor to go over their books. In every such case that I've heard of, the studios have been cooking the books.
Cooking the books might be an overstatement. Sometimes I believe that they used vague language that lent itself to an interpretation favorable to the artist, but legally could be interpreted in the way that the studios were doing. (But this wasn't always the case. In most of the cases that I've heard of the studios were found at fault. I never heard that this lead to criminal charges, though it clearly should have.)
PT Barnum said "There's a sucker born every minute". I doubt this has changed. I suspect that the studios can still find a large crop of names to select from. And it's not clear that the best musicians will have the clearest understanding of what it means to be signed to a studio. (Evidence appears to indicate otherwise.)
However! Several years ago I read a story about how the "modern studio" preferred to NOT sign on talented musicians, because they could become difficult to handle after they had become famous. They preferred people who were of mediocre talent, and could more easily be controlled. Musicians the quality of whose performance depended on the support of the studio.
If this is still true...then it becomes quite probable that the best musicians will never sign with the RIAA studios. And this *isn't* because the RIAA is evil, it's because the studios have intentionally decided to avoid talented musicians. (Which is more stupid than evil.)
What you say *sounds* reasonable. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to match the facts.
The most common profile of a terrorist, according to the research reports that I've seen, is a moderately wealthy, relatively successful, young male. Much like many of the civil rights activists in the US during the 1960's & 70's. So they probably have the same reasons. They are angered by the injustice that they have seen (or believed reports of) done to others.
This makes the problem more difficult. The question becomes: "How do you prevent these people from becoming violent?" During the 1960's Martin Luther King desired to avoid violence, in the Ghandian mode. He was largely successful. If he had encouraged violence, would violence have resulted? Naturally. To what extent? I don't know. How much would that have decreased his following? That depends on innumerable details. I know less about Nelson Mandela, but if anything his success was even greater (I'll grant that he built on MLK, as MLK built on Ghandi.) But that's peaceful resolution because of a decision made by the leadership (and, necessarily, supported by the followers).
I don't have an answer, but the obvious approaches don't seem to work. OTOH, image clearly plays a large part here. As the US is perceived as inherently more violent (and more accessible), more groups focus the anger of their members upon the US. The Romans had a kind of an answer to this, but it's not one that we would consider very civilized. They were either excessively brutal or excessively generous...and they were never generous twice. If they were brutal, there wouldn't be a twice. They'd do things like cutting off the right hand of every male in the tribe. (There *may* have been a cut-off age, but these things weren't formalized. The details were left up to the judgment of the local "generals".)
N.B.: They were also equally brutal internally. Crucifixion wasn't their worst punishment. That was "generally rather quick" meaning only a few days, and less if the soldiers were in a hurry to leave. (They'd break the leg bones and allow a quick death through loss of blood.)
Somehow I don't think that's a desirable direction for our society to head.
OK. Maybe you need three systems, but two can be run under emulation (the MSWind97 and, say, XP, to act as a translator). As for documents...last time I used MSOffice it allowed one to save to several prior versions. Admittedly that was nearing a decade ago now, so it may no longer be true.
As for "copy into past"...??? I have no idea what that means. Possibly the same thing.
Also...borks the formatting? Well, yes, it does. In my experience nearly anything you do with an MSOffice document either borks the formatting, or just makes it unreadable. PDF is much more reliable for fixed documents, and if it's live, why lumber it with MSOffice formats? (Yes, I know "Management has decided that...", and you have to live with it. There's no earthly reason to defend it.)
Also, in case it wasn't obvious, I was proposing a "solution" that would have "sort of" worked...and would have been terrible to use. It was a *joke*! While MS has its face set against interoperable systems, any such are going to be kludges that will only work until MS notices them. The only real solution is to segregate MS to a separate network partition, and only allow interchange of documents whose documentation is adequate and accessible (I didn't say open, because I'm including PDF, and I think Adobe holds rights that prevent it from being truly open...though I'm not certain. And I'm including a large subset of rdf. [I know MS didn't open it, but much of how it works is known, and that subset is allowable...unless there are patents that I don't know about.]) This would be a "pretty good" solution. MSOffice can write pdf files (with a third party extension), and I understand that on Linux pdf files can be edited with pdfedit, though I've never tried. And in the case of MS, I feel that a 3rd party extension is likely to write cleaner code than the obfuscated code that MS would feel obliged to create.
That said, pdf files are hardly ideal for dynamic documents. ODF (odt?) files are far superior in that context. And anyone can download OpenOffice for free, so there's no argument about cost. Expecting OOo files to be able to reproduce exactly what's in an MSOffice document is absurd. If they could do it, MS would change their programs so that they no longer could, so it's a silly race to get into. Get close enough to handle 95%, perhaps. If MS munges things up too much they'll acutally manage to infuriate their own customers. (It's difficult. Anyone who voluntarily sticks with MS must either not know that there are alternatives, or must be a masochist. [OTOH, it's been nearly a decade since I used MS systems...I may possibly be out of date. But I don't believe it.])
Did my years of using MS software leave me ill-disposed towards them? Well, when I started using them I was very favorably disposed towards them. And I have a tendency towards nostalgia. So perhaps there were a few reasons. I would not trust them with a plugged nickel...and a nickel is worth a lot less now than when that phrase was coined.
5 years, plus an unlimited number of renewals for 3 years each...the only catch is, the fee doubles every time...and the first renewal costs $300.
But what about areas with poor signal quality?
I live in an urban valley. I might be able to get a zoning variance to put up a tall antenna, but it's not certain. Rabbit ears suffice at the moment, but the signal quality is poor enough that digital equipment will reputedly not provide ANY visual image. And we don't watch enough TV to warrant cable. (Personally, I haven't watched a single show in the past 3 years, and my wife hasn't seen one in a year or so. Some furniture would need to be re-arranged.)
My guess is that we will just totally quit watching TV. Either that, or I'll get so fed up with my ADSL service that I'll switch to a cable for internet connection, and get cable for TV as a bonus.
probably only by $30-$35.
What you do is you have two systems. One MSWind97 (that sounds wrong!) and the other whatever the current version is. You work on the MSWind97 system and do translations on the current system. You send the translations over a network from the current MSWind system to the working one.
The problem here is that old MS systems don't recognize modern hardware. So you'll need to be running it under emulation. To control expenses, you want a free system to run you emulated system under. As time goes one you may eventually need to be running nested levels of emulation, as, e.g., modern emulators emulate hardware that MSWind95 doesn't recognize. The last time I checked there was still a work around, but I haven't tried to reinstall MSWind95 recently.
The problem is that not only do social norms exist, but so the "the morals I want everyone else to have". And so do "The moral opinions about other people having a good time while I'm stuck at work."
And they aren't the same as the morals by which most people live their lives. Or should be forced to live their lives.
...They're not saying "act the way we want you to". They're saying "don't act in a way that will make our customers leave us".
I'd be less than certain about that. I'll grant that some are acting as you describe. Perhaps the majority. But it's certainly not unknown for corporations to have rules that enforce on the employees the morals that their bosses want them to have. It's happened frequently in the past, so I'd be surprised if it weren't happening now.
More significant would be the percentage that decide to switch away from Vista within more than a week, but less than a month.
(People who got it on a machine and immediately switched to, say, Linux, shouldn't be counted. I'm after the ones that gave it a reasonable trial.)
But when you move out you've got to leave all of your books, movies, records, and business records behind.
(You've got to complete the analogy.)
Well, *one* of the reasons that I don't have flash installed is because I consider it insecure. The EULA is another. There might be others, but those two are sufficient, so I haven't considered further.
Do you have eight living great-grandparents? If so, they may be contacting you. Otherwise...they're a bit...reclusive.
OTOH, any particular distribution *could* eliminate duplicative packages. Some have. Most of the ones that have gone down that route are dead. (I'm not aware of any live exceptions, but I only know a few distros.)
OTOH!! At one time Gnome had Introductory, Medium complexity, Advanced options. At the introductory level one was given a pared down list of packages, and a simplified menu system. Then Gnome2 was introduced, and all that went away. At the same time that KDE was becoming more open (i.e., adopting the GPL) Gnome was becoming less configurable. I no longer use Gnome, except sometimes. (I've got a couple of alternate desktops installed that I check when I'm experiencing problems that might be KDE relates. Sometimes they are, and I'll switch over for a few days, until updates fix the problem. [I'm running Debian testing, so occasional breakages are expectable...but this doesn't mean that I'll always be able to identify the problem. The last one turned out to be {I think!} fixed by an update to libssl. I had not clue.])
Noob friendly...
To me how friendly a system is shows most clearly in how it handles errors. Linux does rather poorly here. Mac does fairly well (i.e., better than any other system I know of). MSWind...sorry, my latest info is from MSWind2000. (And, at work, I refused to install it, and had someone else do the job...after getting as far as the EULA. The company lawyer refused to take the terms of the EULA seriously, but understood [sort of] when I did.)
Now I run Linux. BSD would be an option. Apple would have been an option until last year, when they added that "We have the right to add, modify, copy, or remove any file on your computer" to their EULA. Since then I've recommended disconnecting Macs from the internet and not upgrading. (Nobody pays attention, but I call them as I see them.)
OTOH, your reaction WRT the iBook seems an overreaction. Debian installs just fine on the Mac Notebook, and I presume that it would install without problems on the iBook. (Apple generally makes *very* good hardware. I'm less impressed with their software, but I'm not their target audience.)
Well, if you're generating solar power, and transmitting it at night...
You probably have some other scenario in mind, but it's not clear what. Nuclear? Coal? Transmission is only a part of the problem. But if you're doing long distance transmission, then generation has to be cheap enough to permit the extravagant transmission losses...though some have called into question precisely where in the transmission those losses happen. If it's not in the transmission itself, but in one of the conversion steps, perhaps it's at least partially soluble.
(I really *like* the idea of Solar Space Power Satellites. I'm not sure it's practical, but if so then it might also fit into your proposed scenario.)
That's simple, you just use the month as a decimal version...07.10 for example. You could write it 2007-10 or 7.10 or 7/Oct. They'd all mean the same thing.
And if you have two releases in the same month (say an important bug fix) you could have 2007.12.07 & 2007.12.09. If you need tighter specs you could even append hour, minute, and millisecond (UTC, of course), but that seems rather silly for a public release.
But the power comes from turning potential energy into kinetic energy into electric energy. You don't need the lake for that. One tall pipe will do, with an input at the top and an outflow at the bottom. The lake is for power storage...but that doesn't take much depth. The deep parts of the lake aren't energetically useful.
Still, it *will* start to require continual maintenance. Either that, or you build the dam higher (and plug any gaps in it's surroundings). The second choice may not be feasible, and that would mean dredging every year or so.
Well, since solar cells seem headed toward cheap/KWH (rivaling coal, according to the PR), electricity prices should soon become independent of oil prices. Soon might, however, mean a few decades.
If it works out that way, then SUVs will continue to be reasonable. If it doesn't... Toshiba is selling small nuclear plants. Use one to charge your SUV...but you'll need one near your house. (Line losses are HUGE! Only cheap generation makes long distance transmission at all practical.) The Toshiba plant is SMALL. If everyone is driving SUVs and towing boats, you might need one per block, or at least one every eight blocks. It depends on block-size, of course, but they wouldn't be 10's of miles away.
Otherwise you're depending on the grid...and it wasn't designed to transmit the kind of power that you're talking about, so you're talking about rebuilding it. And that means LOTS of money, so the prices go up, and up.
We'd best hope for cheap solar cells...and expect a tumultuous and unpleasant time until they start arriving in quantity. Fortunately, it looks like the price / kwh for solar cells is already decreasing to the point where they are practical. This means that it may just be a matter of production and tweaking. If so, then cheap solar power might arrive at the same time as the conversion of lots of transport from gas to electric. I'm not sanguine about multi-story buildings producing enough electric power to power themselves, but single family homes might have an excess. Water tanks and reservoirs could be shaded, etc. This should result in a minimal amount of electricity that would need to come in from external sources via the grid.
Or course, storing solar energy is always a problem, but the same batteries and super-capacitors that have been developed for the electric cars should do double duty here. (If not the same ones, then at least the same technology.)
In the long term, things are looking quite hopeful. The transition looks a bit rocky. Just *how* hopeful the long term is depends on how well the current developments in solar cells pan out. This is speculative. We know for sure that it doesn't need to be twice the current price. Hopeful estimates put it at "cheaper than coal". More probable is somewhere in between. All of these are endurable, but perhaps not with SUVs. It depends on just how successful various technologies are. (Various, not just one. A really good super capacitor could do a lot to make up for rather poor developments in solar cells.)
If we're only considering generalized heating, then you're probably correct. Localized heating is a very different matter.
I believe that there has been speculation about massive releases in the past, and that some of the proposed causes had to do with vulcanism. An active eruption wouldn't be necessary to warm a fairly large area by 16C.
And, of course, meteor strikes on the sea bed could also have this effect. So could certain actions by people. We might want to be careful as to just where we dump heat into the oceans. (Some electrical generating plants are proposing to do this in an ongoing manner, which could slowly heat a rather large area. The question might be how slow is required to allow the heat to safely disperse. And they *might* already be considering the stability and locations of cathlates...or they might not.)
But do you also remember just how big and fragile that resulting application was? I never found a single worthwhile use for it because of that, even though is *should* have been quite useful. I ended up requiring my clients to buy their own copies of MSAccess (of a specified edition, because only some versions would work). Needless to say I fled MSAccess as quickly as I was able, It was the print reporting capabilities that made this a difficult process. (These days I'd probably just generate HTML, but that wasn't acceptable at the time.)
What I wrote was because of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-14
... well, hot neutrons. I suppose they are, indeed, hot, but if they're at energies higher than the equivalent of having been excited by an infra-red photon, it seems like it should be said differently.
Where it wrote:
Carbon-14 is produced in the upper layers of the troposphere and the stratosphere by thermal neutrons absorbed by nitrogen atoms.
Probably that's technically correct, and I misinterpreted it, and I certainly couldn't correct it. It would probably be desirable if it were fixed so that it didn't seem to say
Yes, I was being nitpicky. Sorry.
P.S.: Thermal radiation is also lower than visible light. (Per Wikipedia, or possibly Wikibooks. "Thermal solar radiation is probably the major source"etc. paraphrase.) You don't need to get up to the level of visible light to get nitrogen to convert to carbon. It's just quite improbable. I haven't calculated how many microwave photons you would need, but I'd be surprised if it took a thousand. It would still be an improbable conversion, so you're multiplying improbabilities, but possible...I think so. (Significant, not hardly!)
P.P.S: Read over again the great-grandfather post. "So, nuclear has a radioactivity issue. So does sunlight, microwave ovens, televisions, coal burning, X-Rays, and many more items/activities in daily life." Solar *does* have an issue. (Microwave may or may not.) It's not significant, but it has one. And yes, I've already admitted I was being nitpicky. A more serious response would have noted that coal has a more significant radiation hazard...even so, it's other issues are much worse.