I live in a modular home here in Maryland, and for all intents and purposes, it is the same as a stick built home as far as the county and the mortgage company are concerned, and as far as quality of construction, it is better than most stick built homes. There is a distinction between types of modular homes though. One type very common in the South is the Double Wide, which is built up onto a chassis and uses construction techniques similar to those of an RV or office trailer. They typically have relatively thin walls, a low pitch roof, and look like an obviously manufactured building.
The other type is a modular building is one that is built in a factory using techniques similar to a stick built house, and is delivered in modules to the building site on special trailers. The house is set onto a previously built slab or foundation, the same as a conventional house, and is about 90 percent complete once the modules are set. In the case of my house, it features 2x6 walls with R19 insulation in the walls, R30 in the attic (yes it has a 9/12 pitch roof), and a full basement. In order to survive the stresses of the move from the factory to the building site, these houses have more solid flooring, walls that are glued and screwed, and are built to tighter tolerances than the typical stick built home. Construction costs on a per square foot basis are about 10 to 20 percent less than a conventional home, but certain features (such as masonry and stonework) that don't travel well in modular construction that must be added later can drive up the cost.
Compared to the 20 percent smaller 1940s era house I used to live in nearby, my energy bills are less than half of the old house, which leaked cold air in like a sieve.
There were plenty of other things, both terrestrial and astronomical that can wreak havoc with the climate. Major volcanic eruptions such as the ones on Krakatoa and Mount Tambora are repeat offenders, and there are dozens of other volcanoes that can wreak similar havoc with the climate, including America's very own Yellowstone Volcano, and Santorini .
We also face similar hazards from space on a timeframe that people can relate to. The Tunguska Event of 1908 is believed to be a comet that exploded in the upper atmosphere, and resulted in a release of energy equivalent to a large Hydrogen Bomb, and Hiroshima size explosions from meteoroids happen every couple of years. . Events such as this can happen on the scale of a human lifetime, but there are larger objects out there that will likely eventually collide with earth that can have the potential to ruin everyone's day, such as Apophis .
They have been trying to alter our behavior for years
It's not like there is not much content worth pirating on cable anyway, at least on basic cable. They have already watered down the content of once popular and worthwhile channels such as MTV, VH1, Discovery, and the History Channel, so that you pretty much have to upgrade a tier to actually get music videos or real science and history programs instead of mostly reality programming. Don't even get me started about the commercials and self promotion spots that take up nearly half of the programming time. They have also pretty much perfected the art of tailoring programming on the cable channels to tie in with theatrical releases of the latest remake, sequel, or ripoff of the few good original ideas that are allowed to see the light of day. The other 80 percent of basic cable that isn't local broadcast usually fall into several mostly equally insipid categories:
1. Crime and punishment shows, such as Law and Order, CSI, and all of their spinoffs mixed in with a generous mix of Cops, Judge Judy clones, and the like. Nothing like seeing the best of America to lift one's spirits. Typical advertisers are security companies, lawyers, and dodgy debt relief companies
2. Get Rich in Real Estate: Flip this House, Designed to Sell, and similar other programs of this ilk. They are soo 2004, but they gotta fill the airtime somehow when they can't find a real Get Rich Quick huckster with a rented yacht and beachfront villa trying to sell his latest scam.
3. Turner, which takes old movies that have been around forever, and butchers them into an unrecognizable form. Typically they take a 2 hour movie, cut a half hour out of it, then add back in an hour of commercials.
4. Two bit Reality Programming which has taken over even once "respectable" channels.
The "Premium" channels are just as bad, but you have to pay extra for them. In the beginning, there was HBO, and it was good. It was like a second run movie theater with some smaller films and a few turkeys thrown in for good measure. Then HBO spun off Showtime and Cinemax, so you had to subscribe to all 3 to get pretty much the same variety of stuff that used to be available on HBO.
I probably spend 3 times as much time in front of the computer as I do the TV. Yes indeed, Comcast has changed my behavior.
What irks me is that I had my first lines blow when the truck was only 7 years old, and its not like I'm living in the heart of the snow belt, though Maryland likes to spread the salt down thick. Of course, the 93 F-150 was brought to us by the same fine folks who gave us the exploding gas tank design on the old Mustangs and Pintos.
One problem with Aluminum is that it requires a thicker gauge to offset its lack of rigidity, but it is still somewhat lighter than steel. It is also harder to get paint to stick to it, but it can be done.
Ford pickups are notorious for their brake lines rusting, I've had it happen to me 3 times. Twice in a 93, once in a '94. All 3 times I was lucky it happened in my driveway or a parking lot. I don't get it, stainless steel has been around for at least 75 years, and its inexpensive enough to make exhaust systems out of, but not brake lines?
One good argument for changing passwords on a regular basis is where employees share passwords, as the parent mentioned. Suppose one of those employees becomes an ex-employee because of disgruntlement, or because of termination or layoff, and decides to get even. Even when employees have their own individual passwords, employees sometimes share them amongst themselves, intentionally or not, and a leaked password can fall into the wrong hands. Hanging onto a password indefinitely means trusting not only all of your own employees, but all of your ex-employees and vendors who had access to the system indefinitely as well.
An annoying problem that I often see on Craigslist are users who repeatedly post for sale advertisements, who are asking way more than an item is worth. The inverse also happens with Help Wanted advertisements as well, where companies post job listings where they ask for $20/hr skills, but are only willing to pay $10/hr. If I look back a couple of weeks at the listings in a category, quite a few of them are repeat advertisements, sometimes they are repeated many times. The main effect on users seems to be degrading the signal to noise ratio of the listings, and providing unrealistic expectations on pricing for the novice, and decrease the value of the list to legitimate buyers and sellers.
Don't get me wrong, this is how commerce works, nobody is forcing me to buy that 1999 Civic DX that has 200,000 miles on it that someone has listed for 17 grand, but in the days of in print classifieds, the temptation for a seller or an employer to troll for suckers was somewhat tempered by the fact that the advertiser had to pony up real money to continue his trolling expedition. In some categories, such as New York City real estate, the problem got so bad that Craigslist was forced to charge for the listings to reign in this problem, though it gave them an opportunity to make some money as well.
The problem is not limited of course to New York real estate, nor is it limited to Craigslist, just see how many auctions for cars and motorcycles on Ebay actually result in a successful sale where there is actual bidding and the reserve price is met. Before Craigslist, I used to peruse the.forsale listings on Usenet, but long ago became overrun with trolls, spammers, and people pointing towards their Ebay listings. There is also plenty of this type of behavior going on in print media as well, but as I said before, the cost of the ad was a deterrent to the long-term trolling you see in the online forums.
I figure all you can do is ignore the trolls, or hope they become desperate enough to take a realistic offer for their wares. If I'm selling something and I suspect a scammer has responded, I call him on it. Craigslist is still a useful forum to sell and buy stuff, but without some policing of the listings, I fear it will go the way of the old USENET forums and much of EBay, where the legitimate buyers and sellers have had enough of the spammers and scammers, and abandon it for something else.
Here in the Land of Pleasant Living (and also the setting for Homicide and The Wire), Baltimore's main Police HQ is set between President, Fayette, Gay, and Baltimore Streets. For those of you who aren't familiar with the area, the corner of Gay and Baltimore Street is one end of the city's infamous and long standing red light district, and Police HQ backs up to the heart of "The Block". One side of Baltimore Street are strip clubs and streetwalkers, along with the ever-present junkies, pickpockets, and pimps. The other side is the back of Police HQ, and parking is reserved for squad cars of Baltimore's Finest bringing in Baltimore's Worst at all hours of the day and night.
I too have to keep old DOS based systems running at work on the host PCs on our mail extractors. Case in point: A machine we originally got in 1996 came with a cheap Acer 486/33 processor with 8 megs of RAM. I ran that system for 9 years, defragging and running Scandisk on the hard drive and blowing the dust out a couple of times a year. In that time, the only repair I had to make to the system was to replace the CMOS battery after about 6 or 7 years. A power supply failed, I got a used one and forgot to set the voltage selector to 220 volts. Well, that was the end of the Acer.
I got a replacement PC from HQ that was a Celeron 533 or something similar, and it lasted a year or two. Fan crapped out on the CPU. Got a replacement that was a 2.4 Ghz Celeron that lasted only 3 months- Again, fan crapped out on the CPU. If I only hadn't screwed up the Acer, it would probably still be running today.
BTW, I have a Pentium 100 running a sorter that is still going strong going on 10 years. My main problem with the older PCs is backing them up. Floppies are slow, and have become so unreliable that they are hardly worth the bother. Running Ghost is an option, if the Ghost disks on floppy can be read that is.
This has me looking forward to the big MC show in Timmonium MD next February.
Seriously though, the whole industry emphasis on the "Badass Biker" image has caused the industry to turn out mostly expensive toys, either overweight lumbering chrome encrusted cruisers, crotch rockets more at home on the racetrack than the street, and dirt bikes. Not that these categories don't have their own unique appeal, but you have to look pretty hard at the typical motorcycle dealer to find anything new that could be remotely considered a both fun and practical alternative to the 4 wheeled cages most of us drive.
Ever go to a Motorcycle show? Seriously, they are crawling with scantily clad females, along with lots and lots of outrageous costumes, posters, and artwork on the bikes themselves. Heck, I wonder if say the makers of GTA or the like wouldn't do well to get a booth at one of these events.
Actually, a driverless car might be just in time for a lot of the Baby Boomer generation as they get into their 60's and 70's, just as their mounting health problems take their toll on driving skills. Accident rates tend to be lowest for drivers in their 40's and 50's, when mature judgment backed by decades of experience more than compensate for slower reaction times and loss of motor skills they had in their youth. Accident rates start rising again as people get on into their 60's and the effects of decreased vision, the onset of heart disease, diabetes, and the host of other problems which affect the elderly start to take their toll. Some people are good drivers well into their 80's, but others may lose their ability to drive safely much earlier as a result of strokes, heart disease, sleep problems, and the general dulling of the senses and slowdown of mental functions.
Often the elderly gradually retreat from driving, but it remains a vital lifeline to their independence. They shy away from driving at night or in bad weather, or in situations where traffic is heavy and complex, but they treasure their ability to get to the store, the pharmacy, or the local bridge game without having to depend on others. For many it is the difference between being able to remain independent or having to move into "assisted living" or back in with their kids. Having to give up the car keys ranks right up there with losing a spouse or having a major setback in their health for many.
Even a partially driverless system would be a boon to those elderly who, while they might not have the ability or stamina to handle a 6 hour drive from say Philly to Pittsburgh to visit the grandkids, could handle the drive from their home in say Levittown to the PA Turnpike (only a few miles), put it on autopilot and relax for 6 hours, then go back on manual when they near their destination, perhaps aided by a GPS navigation system. Heck, I would even like to have the ability to put it on autopilot for a while even for my 75 mile commute each day!
As an aside, I've seen in my own family that the elderly have widely varying attitudes towards tech. My 78 year old Dad has always embraced tech, he's said that the ability to utilize modern technology gave him an edge in business and in life, he could fix just about anything, and often still can. He owned and knew how to use an IBM XT and had a cellphone way back in the '80s, was on the internet with Compuserve in the 1992, 4 years before I went online. He grew up a farm boy, served in Korea in Ordinance, where he learned about computers and electronics, then went on to a successful career in the diesel engine business. On the other hand, I have an 82 year old aunt that refused to get a microwave oven until one of her kids brought her one a couple of years ago, does not own a computer, and still had a rotary dial phone until the phone company made her replace it recently. She isn't destitute or uneducated, she is a retired teacher living on a pension, and owns her home outright.
Some additional thought would need to be made into the selection of aggregate materials for the asphalt. Here in MD, and in many other areas, once the surface coating of the actual asphalt wears or washes away, the exposed aggregate is actually almost white, where the aggregate is of certain types of flint, quartz, limestone, or marble. Many of the aggregates from established quarries would be poorly suited to absorbing heat, necessitating the establishment of new quarries, or having to transport more suitable aggregates long distances.
Well, with the cost of coal being a fraction of the cost of oil, it might just make economic sense from a fuel cost standpoint to bring back the steam locomotives. Of course there will be problems, such as carbon and particulate emissions, boiler maintenance costs, and safety concerns (improperly managed boilers can fail catastrophically) which doomed almost all of the old steam locomotives to the scrapyards over 50 years ago.
Although there are a fair number privately operated steam railways operating as either scenic railways or rolling museums, both in the US and Europe, the Diesel-Electric locomotive or electrified railways continue to be dominant in most of the First and Second World. The technology exists for building a new generation of steam locomotives which would address many of the problems of their 19th and early 20th century counterparts, and do it at much greater efficiencies, but there is hardly a groundswell of activity aimed at making this a reality.
That's the way I feel about Verizon. Yeah, I'm not particularly happy with Comcast's selection on basic cable that costs me over $100/month with internet, but at least it works decently. I'm in a semi-rural area just about 20 miles from Baltimore, and Verizon's land-line service is a joke! Most calls to other suburbs of Baltimore are long-distance, unless you sign up for one of their bundles, get a plan, or a Baltimore line. Anyway you cut it, it will cost $70/month, more or less just for usable phone service. As far as line quality is concerned, on a good day the line was good for 31.2 kbps when I first got online 12 years ago but it had deteriorated to 24 kbps when it worked at all before I finally was able to give up on dial-up. Often it is so bad it is unusable even for voice communications. The trunks are probably the ones originally installed back in the 1950's, and the ravages of time and repeated lightning strikes along the line render it waterlogged whenever it rains. Except for a couple of small sections of line, I haven't seen them do any upgrades of their lines or equipment along this 3 mile stretch of road in the 15 years I have lived in this area.
Verizon's strategy for dealing with this when you call for service seems to be to schedule an appointment time during the workday at about a week out, which allows time for the line to dry out. Its real tough to navigate their voice menu system when your phone barely works in order to actually schedule an appointment. When the tech arrives he says the line is OK, it must be my wiring inside the house. After repeated attempts, I did manage to get them to swap to a "spare pair" that is just as bad as the original one. After 5 or 6 tries, I gave up and my neighbor and I got together to convince Comcast to run a line down our lane.
We don't even have DSL available in the area, I guess we are at the bottom of the list for FIOS as well. I guess they'll wire the townhouses, apartment complexes, and McMansions owned by their executives first I guess. I told them to email me when FIOS is available, but I'm not holding my breath, they promised us DSL in a year or so 7 years ago. First of the year the land-line gets cut, most people call me on my cell phone anyway.
As long as the population is increasing, all other things being equal then the value of land will rise. Rising per capita incomes will also tend to increase the value of land, as now wealthier people will demand more of it. Turn it around and have a population reducing event, such as a plague or regional economic catastrophe which causes people to move away, then there is surplus land, which drives down the price.
The only way to really make out on a used car transaction is to find buyers before they trade in their car, and offer them a little more than what the dealer will give them. A private deal carries substantial inconveniences and risks, mostly because of the lack of recourse if you find hidden problems, and because you usually have to come up with a substantial amount of cash, and the seller has to maintain tags and insurance on a vehicle that might not immediately sell. This results in a substantial proportion of the potential deals being locked up within the closed world of the car dealerships, where the motto buy low, sell high prevails.
Another problem is that the "real deals" are rarely prominently advertised. A search of completed Ebay listings for most categories of cars and motorcycles shows that fewer than one in 3 auctions are successful, either the starting bid or reserve price is set so high, that either they attract no bids, or fail to meet the reserve price. Similar trolling goes on on Craigslist, where vehicles are repeatedly listed for well over their real worth. Dealer ads in the papers are much the same. All the time I see 5 year old Accords with 100,000 miles on them being offered for $12,900, while you can buy a brand new one for about $18,000.
The real deals rarely stay around for long, so you need to be prepared to act when they do. I've picked up a couple good deals on used vehicles through either word of mouth or very local ads.
A barrel of oil might typically yield the quoted figure of 21 gallons of gasoline per 42 gallon barrel, but that same barrel of oil will also yield diesel fuel, lubricants, jet fuel (kerosene), asphalt, and a number of other valuable products that sell for the most part at prices equivalent to gasoline. If you look at the entire product stream, about 90 percent of the energy value of a barrel of crude oil makes its way into finished products.
Newspapers format their text into long narrow columns for this very reason. It minimizes the constant back and forth scanning your eyeballs need to do to read long lines of text. Because of space constraints, they need to pack their columns tightly and in smallish fonts. Imagine if a newspaper was formatted the same way many textbooks and novels are, with the text filling the entire width of the page (sans margins).
Online, screen real estate is a flexible commodity, but I find when reading.pdf documents it tends to be the worst of both worlds. Even with a 19" widescreen monitor running 1440x900, the full size rendition only shows the top half of the page frequently, which forces you to constantly scroll up and down for documents that are printed in multiple columns. Even though my 19" monitor has a screen size of about 10"x16", the browser window reduces the effective area by about 30% or so. Shrinking the document to fit the entire page on the monitor is just as bad, and can be worse, since it shrinks the fonts to an unreadable size, especially the way the fonts tend to get interpolated.
The only way I can see out of this situation is to have a monitor big and tall enough to display a full-size 8 1/2" x 11" page within the browser window My guess is that it would have to be at least a 23" widescreen to display pages side by side, running a resolution of about 1800x1200.
As one in the "Elderly" generation (I'm 47), I can say that I have had my periods of video game addiction. My parents, who are in their 70s, spend hours at a time playing Freecell on their his and her's laptops, even when I visit. They've always liked card games and table games like Dominoes and Scrabble, the games they like on the computer are an extension of this genre.
If you are paying $5 for a CFLB, then you are paying too much. I buy them by the 6-pack at Home Depot for about $10 for the 60 watt equivalents, which are great for use in ceiling fans, multiple bulb bathroom fixtures and the like. For the 100 watt equivalents, I pay about $3 each. You can pay that much if you buy them individually, for the multi-packs you can usually get a good discount. I have been using them for years, and the convenience of not having to constantly replace bulbs all the time is worth their price alone.
Also, remember that almost all the energy in indoor lighting eventually gets converted into heat. This means in the summertime, you have to pay for that energy twice, once to light the bulb, and once to run the air conditioning to remove the excess heat. During the winter, the heat produced by lighting does offset heating costs somewhat, but keep in mind that electric resistance heating is one of the most expensive forms of heat around, BTU per BTU. Your main heating source is probably cheaper to run than resistance heating.
The only other drawback I have found is that they do create a bit of Radio Frequency Interference. If you are a Ham Radio enthusiast, or listen to AM or Shortwave Radio, this could be an issue for you.
As manufacturing capacity in certain areas declines, so does investment in new power infrastructure devoted to supplying industry. Even so, many industries such as autos and steel are indeed producing much more than their decline in employment would indicate. Locally, the Mittal Steel plant (formerly Bethlehem Steel) plant in Sparrows Point MD produces half as much steel as it did in its heyday in the '60s, but does it with a tenth of its former workforce which was over 20,000 during that time. Bethlehem Steel, which has onsite coke ovens and Basic Oxygen furnaces which generates its own power onsite, and has even sold the surplus back to BG&E. I'm not sure if this capability remains though. This is not true of all steelmaking operations, Electric Arc furnaces consume huge amounts of power. Oil refiners also have the opportunity to generate much of their power directly as well.
Maryland's economy is booming anyway, thanks to the growth of the Federal Government and the desire of companies to be located nearby to benefit from and service its largesse. It has replaced manufacturing as the anchor of the economy around here. There are still pockets of the country where the decline of heavy industry has not been offset by something else, say around Buffalo, Cleveland, or other pockets of the rust belt around the Midwest.
Those of us in Field Service have been doing this ever since the first carpenter put his sack of tools on the back of a mule to go repair an ancient roof or remodel a cooking pit. The home office is something I visit once or twice a year if that. Most of my work is done at a customer worksite, from my car, or occasionally from home to finish paperwork.
As someone who is descended at least partially from "peasant classes" here in America, I would like to point out that given the opportunity, at least some of these "peasants" will end up contributing to the advancement of science and technology. Nearly all of my great-grandparent's generation, and my father's parents were farmers. My dad worked his way up into management from being a truck driver and mechanic, my mom put herself through nursing school, and together they put me and my 3 other siblings through college. Two of us have advanced degrees, and all of us have worked in fields requiring a high degree of technical knowledge.
One of the reasons why our "peasant class" has shrunk is that this is a typical American story. 75 years ago, most Americans worked away in factories, mines, or on the farm, for wages that provided for survival and little more. The thing that made the difference was that most children of the era got at a good enough basic education in reading and math so at least the brighter minds of the era were able to see a future beyond the meatpacking plant, coal mine, or dairy farm where many of their parents toiled away their lives.
For China to truly be an economic powerhouse that delivers levels of prosperity to all of its people, it must break down the barriers of ignorance and cultural stratification that keep the peasant class intact. But here is some serious food for thought: If China can deliver a First-World education to only 25 percent of its population, their economic power in the world will eventually surpass ours. America, with its own educated workforce and natural resources will continue to do relatively well, but it will fade as the main focus on the world stage in a manner similar to how Western Europe has faded since WWII. Most of Western Europe is still relatively prosperous, but they are not where the action is, generally speaking.
In the early history of the USA, Americans sent their best and brightest to the great learning centers of Europe to finish their education. Eventually, the universities and colleges here in America became good enough that Americans looked to Harvard or MIT for inspiration, instead of Oxford or Cambridge. Today, the Asians look to America for higher learning, but it is becoming less necessary to actually come to America, since research papers and other important publications are more likely to be on a university web server than tucked away on a shelf in a dusty old ivy covered building. For some things, particularly experiments in High-Energy Physics, there is no good substitute for having your own multi-billion dollar research facility on the scale of Argonne or Stanford and an educated staff to run it in order to do leading-edge research. However, for much of the training that needs to take place for the majority of engineers, physicians, IT people, and business management professionals, a classroom in Shanghai works about as well as one in Boston.
China is still trying to find itself in the sense of what it is best able to do in the long-run. China is dabbling in Physics, but it is also a formidable force to be reckoned with in other fields as well, particularly Medicine. Manufacturing, which is carrying the economy right now, is mostly built on technology derived from other countries, and is fueled by cheap labor. For many products, making them with secondhand machinery or not quite bleeding edge tech is good enough if you have cheap enough labor, but as wages rise and newer technologies emerge, they will see their industries decline as they did here 30 years ago, unless they reinvest their current profits into research and education to create leading edge technology of their own.
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I live in a modular home here in Maryland, and for all intents and purposes, it is the same as a stick built home as far as the county and the mortgage company are concerned, and as far as quality of construction, it is better than most stick built homes. There is a distinction between types of modular homes though. One type very common in the South is the Double Wide, which is built up onto a chassis and uses construction techniques similar to those of an RV or office trailer. They typically have relatively thin walls, a low pitch roof, and look like an obviously manufactured building.
The other type is a modular building is one that is built in a factory using techniques similar to a stick built house, and is delivered in modules to the building site on special trailers. The house is set onto a previously built slab or foundation, the same as a conventional house, and is about 90 percent complete once the modules are set. In the case of my house, it features 2x6 walls with R19 insulation in the walls, R30 in the attic (yes it has a 9/12 pitch roof), and a full basement. In order to survive the stresses of the move from the factory to the building site, these houses have more solid flooring, walls that are glued and screwed, and are built to tighter tolerances than the typical stick built home. Construction costs on a per square foot basis are about 10 to 20 percent less than a conventional home, but certain features (such as masonry and stonework) that don't travel well in modular construction that must be added later can drive up the cost.
Compared to the 20 percent smaller 1940s era house I used to live in nearby, my energy bills are less than half of the old house, which leaked cold air in like a sieve.
There were plenty of other things, both terrestrial and astronomical that can wreak havoc with the climate. Major volcanic eruptions such as the ones on Krakatoa and Mount Tambora are repeat offenders, and there are dozens of other volcanoes that can wreak similar havoc with the climate, including America's very own Yellowstone Volcano, and Santorini .
We also face similar hazards from space on a timeframe that people can relate to. The Tunguska Event of 1908 is believed to be a comet that exploded in the upper atmosphere, and resulted in a release of energy equivalent to a large Hydrogen Bomb, and Hiroshima size explosions from meteoroids happen every couple of years. . Events such as this can happen on the scale of a human lifetime, but there are larger objects out there that will likely eventually collide with earth that can have the potential to ruin everyone's day, such as Apophis .
They have been trying to alter our behavior for years
It's not like there is not much content worth pirating on cable anyway, at least on basic cable. They have already watered down the content of once popular and worthwhile channels such as MTV, VH1, Discovery, and the History Channel, so that you pretty much have to upgrade a tier to actually get music videos or real science and history programs instead of mostly reality programming. Don't even get me started about the commercials and self promotion spots that take up nearly half of the programming time. They have also pretty much perfected the art of tailoring programming on the cable channels to tie in with theatrical releases of the latest remake, sequel, or ripoff of the few good original ideas that are allowed to see the light of day. The other 80 percent of basic cable that isn't local broadcast usually fall into several mostly equally insipid categories:
1. Crime and punishment shows, such as Law and Order, CSI, and all of their spinoffs mixed in with a generous mix of Cops, Judge Judy clones, and the like. Nothing like seeing the best of America to lift one's spirits. Typical advertisers are security companies, lawyers, and dodgy debt relief companies
2. Get Rich in Real Estate: Flip this House, Designed to Sell, and similar other programs of this ilk. They are soo 2004, but they gotta fill the airtime somehow when they can't find a real Get Rich Quick huckster with a rented yacht and beachfront villa trying to sell his latest scam.
3. Turner, which takes old movies that have been around forever, and butchers them into an unrecognizable form. Typically they take a 2 hour movie, cut a half hour out of it, then add back in an hour of commercials.
4. Two bit Reality Programming which has taken over even once "respectable" channels.
The "Premium" channels are just as bad, but you have to pay extra for them. In the beginning, there was HBO, and it was good. It was like a second run movie theater with some smaller films and a few turkeys thrown in for good measure. Then HBO spun off Showtime and Cinemax, so you had to subscribe to all 3 to get pretty much the same variety of stuff that used to be available on HBO.
I probably spend 3 times as much time in front of the computer as I do the TV. Yes indeed, Comcast has changed my behavior.
What irks me is that I had my first lines blow when the truck was only 7 years old, and its not like I'm living in the heart of the snow belt, though Maryland likes to spread the salt down thick. Of course, the 93 F-150 was brought to us by the same fine folks who gave us the exploding gas tank design on the old Mustangs and Pintos.
One problem with Aluminum is that it requires a thicker gauge to offset its lack of rigidity, but it is still somewhat lighter than steel. It is also harder to get paint to stick to it, but it can be done.
Ford pickups are notorious for their brake lines rusting, I've had it happen to me 3 times. Twice in a 93, once in a '94. All 3 times I was lucky it happened in my driveway or a parking lot. I don't get it, stainless steel has been around for at least 75 years, and its inexpensive enough to make exhaust systems out of, but not brake lines?
One good argument for changing passwords on a regular basis is where employees share passwords, as the parent mentioned. Suppose one of those employees becomes an ex-employee because of disgruntlement, or because of termination or layoff, and decides to get even. Even when employees have their own individual passwords, employees sometimes share them amongst themselves, intentionally or not, and a leaked password can fall into the wrong hands. Hanging onto a password indefinitely means trusting not only all of your own employees, but all of your ex-employees and vendors who had access to the system indefinitely as well.
An annoying problem that I often see on Craigslist are users who repeatedly post for sale advertisements, who are asking way more than an item is worth. The inverse also happens with Help Wanted advertisements as well, where companies post job listings where they ask for $20/hr skills, but are only willing to pay $10/hr. If I look back a couple of weeks at the listings in a category, quite a few of them are repeat advertisements, sometimes they are repeated many times. The main effect on users seems to be degrading the signal to noise ratio of the listings, and providing unrealistic expectations on pricing for the novice, and decrease the value of the list to legitimate buyers and sellers.
Don't get me wrong, this is how commerce works, nobody is forcing me to buy that 1999 Civic DX that has 200,000 miles on it that someone has listed for 17 grand, but in the days of in print classifieds, the temptation for a seller or an employer to troll for suckers was somewhat tempered by the fact that the advertiser had to pony up real money to continue his trolling expedition. In some categories, such as New York City real estate, the problem got so bad that Craigslist was forced to charge for the listings to reign in this problem, though it gave them an opportunity to make some money as well.
The problem is not limited of course to New York real estate, nor is it limited to Craigslist, just see how many auctions for cars and motorcycles on Ebay actually result in a successful sale where there is actual bidding and the reserve price is met. Before Craigslist, I used to peruse the .forsale listings on Usenet, but long ago became overrun with trolls, spammers, and people pointing towards their Ebay listings. There is also plenty of this type of behavior going on in print media as well, but as I said before, the cost of the ad was a deterrent to the long-term trolling you see in the online forums.
I figure all you can do is ignore the trolls, or hope they become desperate enough to take a realistic offer for their wares. If I'm selling something and I suspect a scammer has responded, I call him on it. Craigslist is still a useful forum to sell and buy stuff, but without some policing of the listings, I fear it will go the way of the old USENET forums and much of EBay, where the legitimate buyers and sellers have had enough of the spammers and scammers, and abandon it for something else.
Here in the Land of Pleasant Living (and also the setting for Homicide and The Wire), Baltimore's main Police HQ is set between President, Fayette, Gay, and Baltimore Streets. For those of you who aren't familiar with the area, the corner of Gay and Baltimore Street is one end of the city's infamous and long standing red light district, and Police HQ backs up to the heart of "The Block". One side of Baltimore Street are strip clubs and streetwalkers, along with the ever-present junkies, pickpockets, and pimps. The other side is the back of Police HQ, and parking is reserved for squad cars of Baltimore's Finest bringing in Baltimore's Worst at all hours of the day and night.
I too have to keep old DOS based systems running at work on the host PCs on our mail extractors. Case in point: A machine we originally got in 1996 came with a cheap Acer 486/33 processor with 8 megs of RAM. I ran that system for 9 years, defragging and running Scandisk on the hard drive and blowing the dust out a couple of times a year. In that time, the only repair I had to make to the system was to replace the CMOS battery after about 6 or 7 years. A power supply failed, I got a used one and forgot to set the voltage selector to 220 volts. Well, that was the end of the Acer.
I got a replacement PC from HQ that was a Celeron 533 or something similar, and it lasted a year or two. Fan crapped out on the CPU. Got a replacement that was a 2.4 Ghz Celeron that lasted only 3 months- Again, fan crapped out on the CPU. If I only hadn't screwed up the Acer, it would probably still be running today.
BTW, I have a Pentium 100 running a sorter that is still going strong going on 10 years. My main problem with the older PCs is backing them up. Floppies are slow, and have become so unreliable that they are hardly worth the bother. Running Ghost is an option, if the Ghost disks on floppy can be read that is.
This has me looking forward to the big MC show in Timmonium MD next February.
Seriously though, the whole industry emphasis on the "Badass Biker" image has caused the industry to turn out mostly expensive toys, either overweight lumbering chrome encrusted cruisers, crotch rockets more at home on the racetrack than the street, and dirt bikes. Not that these categories don't have their own unique appeal, but you have to look pretty hard at the typical motorcycle dealer to find anything new that could be remotely considered a both fun and practical alternative to the 4 wheeled cages most of us drive.
Ever go to a Motorcycle show? Seriously, they are crawling with scantily clad females, along with lots and lots of outrageous costumes, posters, and artwork on the bikes themselves. Heck, I wonder if say the makers of GTA or the like wouldn't do well to get a booth at one of these events.
With the sounds of Echoes in the background.
Actually, a driverless car might be just in time for a lot of the Baby Boomer generation as they get into their 60's and 70's, just as their mounting health problems take their toll on driving skills. Accident rates tend to be lowest for drivers in their 40's and 50's, when mature judgment backed by decades of experience more than compensate for slower reaction times and loss of motor skills they had in their youth. Accident rates start rising again as people get on into their 60's and the effects of decreased vision, the onset of heart disease, diabetes, and the host of other problems which affect the elderly start to take their toll. Some people are good drivers well into their 80's, but others may lose their ability to drive safely much earlier as a result of strokes, heart disease, sleep problems, and the general dulling of the senses and slowdown of mental functions.
Often the elderly gradually retreat from driving, but it remains a vital lifeline to their independence. They shy away from driving at night or in bad weather, or in situations where traffic is heavy and complex, but they treasure their ability to get to the store, the pharmacy, or the local bridge game without having to depend on others. For many it is the difference between being able to remain independent or having to move into "assisted living" or back in with their kids. Having to give up the car keys ranks right up there with losing a spouse or having a major setback in their health for many.
Even a partially driverless system would be a boon to those elderly who, while they might not have the ability or stamina to handle a 6 hour drive from say Philly to Pittsburgh to visit the grandkids, could handle the drive from their home in say Levittown to the PA Turnpike (only a few miles), put it on autopilot and relax for 6 hours, then go back on manual when they near their destination, perhaps aided by a GPS navigation system. Heck, I would even like to have the ability to put it on autopilot for a while even for my 75 mile commute each day!
As an aside, I've seen in my own family that the elderly have widely varying attitudes towards tech. My 78 year old Dad has always embraced tech, he's said that the ability to utilize modern technology gave him an edge in business and in life, he could fix just about anything, and often still can. He owned and knew how to use an IBM XT and had a cellphone way back in the '80s, was on the internet with Compuserve in the 1992, 4 years before I went online. He grew up a farm boy, served in Korea in Ordinance, where he learned about computers and electronics, then went on to a successful career in the diesel engine business. On the other hand, I have an 82 year old aunt that refused to get a microwave oven until one of her kids brought her one a couple of years ago, does not own a computer, and still had a rotary dial phone until the phone company made her replace it recently. She isn't destitute or uneducated, she is a retired teacher living on a pension, and owns her home outright.
Some additional thought would need to be made into the selection of aggregate materials for the asphalt. Here in MD, and in many other areas, once the surface coating of the actual asphalt wears or washes away, the exposed aggregate is actually almost white, where the aggregate is of certain types of flint, quartz, limestone, or marble. Many of the aggregates from established quarries would be poorly suited to absorbing heat, necessitating the establishment of new quarries, or having to transport more suitable aggregates long distances.
Well, with the cost of coal being a fraction of the cost of oil, it might just make economic sense from a fuel cost standpoint to bring back the steam locomotives. Of course there will be problems, such as carbon and particulate emissions, boiler maintenance costs, and safety concerns (improperly managed boilers can fail catastrophically) which doomed almost all of the old steam locomotives to the scrapyards over 50 years ago.
Although there are a fair number privately operated steam railways operating as either scenic railways or rolling museums, both in the US and Europe, the Diesel-Electric locomotive or electrified railways continue to be dominant in most of the First and Second World. The technology exists for building a new generation of steam locomotives which would address many of the problems of their 19th and early 20th century counterparts, and do it at much greater efficiencies, but there is hardly a groundswell of activity aimed at making this a reality.
That's the way I feel about Verizon. Yeah, I'm not particularly happy with Comcast's selection on basic cable that costs me over $100/month with internet, but at least it works decently. I'm in a semi-rural area just about 20 miles from Baltimore, and Verizon's land-line service is a joke! Most calls to other suburbs of Baltimore are long-distance, unless you sign up for one of their bundles, get a plan, or a Baltimore line. Anyway you cut it, it will cost $70/month, more or less just for usable phone service. As far as line quality is concerned, on a good day the line was good for 31.2 kbps when I first got online 12 years ago but it had deteriorated to 24 kbps when it worked at all before I finally was able to give up on dial-up. Often it is so bad it is unusable even for voice communications. The trunks are probably the ones originally installed back in the 1950's, and the ravages of time and repeated lightning strikes along the line render it waterlogged whenever it rains. Except for a couple of small sections of line, I haven't seen them do any upgrades of their lines or equipment along this 3 mile stretch of road in the 15 years I have lived in this area.
Verizon's strategy for dealing with this when you call for service seems to be to schedule an appointment time during the workday at about a week out, which allows time for the line to dry out. Its real tough to navigate their voice menu system when your phone barely works in order to actually schedule an appointment. When the tech arrives he says the line is OK, it must be my wiring inside the house. After repeated attempts, I did manage to get them to swap to a "spare pair" that is just as bad as the original one. After 5 or 6 tries, I gave up and my neighbor and I got together to convince Comcast to run a line down our lane.
We don't even have DSL available in the area, I guess we are at the bottom of the list for FIOS as well. I guess they'll wire the townhouses, apartment complexes, and McMansions owned by their executives first I guess. I told them to email me when FIOS is available, but I'm not holding my breath, they promised us DSL in a year or so 7 years ago. First of the year the land-line gets cut, most people call me on my cell phone anyway.
As long as the population is increasing, all other things being equal then the value of land will rise. Rising per capita incomes will also tend to increase the value of land, as now wealthier people will demand more of it. Turn it around and have a population reducing event, such as a plague or regional economic catastrophe which causes people to move away, then there is surplus land, which drives down the price.
The only way to really make out on a used car transaction is to find buyers before they trade in their car, and offer them a little more than what the dealer will give them. A private deal carries substantial inconveniences and risks, mostly because of the lack of recourse if you find hidden problems, and because you usually have to come up with a substantial amount of cash, and the seller has to maintain tags and insurance on a vehicle that might not immediately sell. This results in a substantial proportion of the potential deals being locked up within the closed world of the car dealerships, where the motto buy low, sell high prevails.
Another problem is that the "real deals" are rarely prominently advertised. A search of completed Ebay listings for most categories of cars and motorcycles shows that fewer than one in 3 auctions are successful, either the starting bid or reserve price is set so high, that either they attract no bids, or fail to meet the reserve price. Similar trolling goes on on Craigslist, where vehicles are repeatedly listed for well over their real worth. Dealer ads in the papers are much the same. All the time I see 5 year old Accords with 100,000 miles on them being offered for $12,900, while you can buy a brand new one for about $18,000.
The real deals rarely stay around for long, so you need to be prepared to act when they do. I've picked up a couple good deals on used vehicles through either word of mouth or very local ads.
A barrel of oil might typically yield the quoted figure of 21 gallons of gasoline per 42 gallon barrel, but that same barrel of oil will also yield diesel fuel, lubricants, jet fuel (kerosene), asphalt, and a number of other valuable products that sell for the most part at prices equivalent to gasoline. If you look at the entire product stream, about 90 percent of the energy value of a barrel of crude oil makes its way into finished products.
Newspapers format their text into long narrow columns for this very reason. It minimizes the constant back and forth scanning your eyeballs need to do to read long lines of text. Because of space constraints, they need to pack their columns tightly and in smallish fonts. Imagine if a newspaper was formatted the same way many textbooks and novels are, with the text filling the entire width of the page (sans margins).
.pdf documents it tends to be the worst of both worlds. Even with a 19" widescreen monitor running 1440x900, the full size rendition only shows the top half of the page frequently, which forces you to constantly scroll up and down for documents that are printed in multiple columns. Even though my 19" monitor has a screen size of about 10"x16", the browser window reduces the effective area by about 30% or so. Shrinking the document to fit the entire page on the monitor is just as bad, and can be worse, since it shrinks the fonts to an unreadable size, especially the way the fonts tend to get interpolated.
Online, screen real estate is a flexible commodity, but I find when reading
The only way I can see out of this situation is to have a monitor big and tall enough to display a full-size 8 1/2" x 11" page within the browser window My guess is that it would have to be at least a 23" widescreen to display pages side by side, running a resolution of about 1800x1200.
As one in the "Elderly" generation (I'm 47), I can say that I have had my periods of video game addiction. My parents, who are in their 70s, spend hours at a time playing Freecell on their his and her's laptops, even when I visit. They've always liked card games and table games like Dominoes and Scrabble, the games they like on the computer are an extension of this genre.
If you are paying $5 for a CFLB, then you are paying too much. I buy them by the 6-pack at Home Depot for about $10 for the 60 watt equivalents, which are great for use in ceiling fans, multiple bulb bathroom fixtures and the like. For the 100 watt equivalents, I pay about $3 each. You can pay that much if you buy them individually, for the multi-packs you can usually get a good discount. I have been using them for years, and the convenience of not having to constantly replace bulbs all the time is worth their price alone.
Also, remember that almost all the energy in indoor lighting eventually gets converted into heat. This means in the summertime, you have to pay for that energy twice, once to light the bulb, and once to run the air conditioning to remove the excess heat. During the winter, the heat produced by lighting does offset heating costs somewhat, but keep in mind that electric resistance heating is one of the most expensive forms of heat around, BTU per BTU. Your main heating source is probably cheaper to run than resistance heating.
The only other drawback I have found is that they do create a bit of Radio Frequency Interference. If you are a Ham Radio enthusiast, or listen to AM or Shortwave Radio, this could be an issue for you.
As manufacturing capacity in certain areas declines, so does investment in new power infrastructure devoted to supplying industry. Even so, many industries such as autos and steel are indeed producing much more than their decline in employment would indicate. Locally, the Mittal Steel plant (formerly Bethlehem Steel) plant in Sparrows Point MD produces half as much steel as it did in its heyday in the '60s, but does it with a tenth of its former workforce which was over 20,000 during that time. Bethlehem Steel, which has onsite coke ovens and Basic Oxygen furnaces which generates its own power onsite, and has even sold the surplus back to BG&E. I'm not sure if this capability remains though. This is not true of all steelmaking operations, Electric Arc furnaces consume huge amounts of power. Oil refiners also have the opportunity to generate much of their power directly as well.
Maryland's economy is booming anyway, thanks to the growth of the Federal Government and the desire of companies to be located nearby to benefit from and service its largesse. It has replaced manufacturing as the anchor of the economy around here. There are still pockets of the country where the decline of heavy industry has not been offset by something else, say around Buffalo, Cleveland, or other pockets of the rust belt around the Midwest.
Those of us in Field Service have been doing this ever since the first carpenter put his sack of tools on the back of a mule to go repair an ancient roof or remodel a cooking pit. The home office is something I visit once or twice a year if that. Most of my work is done at a customer worksite, from my car, or occasionally from home to finish paperwork.
As someone who is descended at least partially from "peasant classes" here in America, I would like to point out that given the opportunity, at least some of these "peasants" will end up contributing to the advancement of science and technology. Nearly all of my great-grandparent's generation, and my father's parents were farmers. My dad worked his way up into management from being a truck driver and mechanic, my mom put herself through nursing school, and together they put me and my 3 other siblings through college. Two of us have advanced degrees, and all of us have worked in fields requiring a high degree of technical knowledge.
One of the reasons why our "peasant class" has shrunk is that this is a typical American story. 75 years ago, most Americans worked away in factories, mines, or on the farm, for wages that provided for survival and little more. The thing that made the difference was that most children of the era got at a good enough basic education in reading and math so at least the brighter minds of the era were able to see a future beyond the meatpacking plant, coal mine, or dairy farm where many of their parents toiled away their lives.
For China to truly be an economic powerhouse that delivers levels of prosperity to all of its people, it must break down the barriers of ignorance and cultural stratification that keep the peasant class intact. But here is some serious food for thought: If China can deliver a First-World education to only 25 percent of its population, their economic power in the world will eventually surpass ours. America, with its own educated workforce and natural resources will continue to do relatively well, but it will fade as the main focus on the world stage in a manner similar to how Western Europe has faded since WWII. Most of Western Europe is still relatively prosperous, but they are not where the action is, generally speaking.
In the early history of the USA, Americans sent their best and brightest to the great learning centers of Europe to finish their education. Eventually, the universities and colleges here in America became good enough that Americans looked to Harvard or MIT for inspiration, instead of Oxford or Cambridge. Today, the Asians look to America for higher learning, but it is becoming less necessary to actually come to America, since research papers and other important publications are more likely to be on a university web server than tucked away on a shelf in a dusty old ivy covered building. For some things, particularly experiments in High-Energy Physics, there is no good substitute for having your own multi-billion dollar research facility on the scale of Argonne or Stanford and an educated staff to run it in order to do leading-edge research. However, for much of the training that needs to take place for the majority of engineers, physicians, IT people, and business management professionals, a classroom in Shanghai works about as well as one in Boston.
China is still trying to find itself in the sense of what it is best able to do in the long-run. China is dabbling in Physics, but it is also a formidable force to be reckoned with in other fields as well, particularly Medicine. Manufacturing, which is carrying the economy right now, is mostly built on technology derived from other countries, and is fueled by cheap labor. For many products, making them with secondhand machinery or not quite bleeding edge tech is good enough if you have cheap enough labor, but as wages rise and newer technologies emerge, they will see their industries decline as they did here 30 years ago, unless they reinvest their current profits into research and education to create leading edge technology of their own.