I live on the Gold Coast at a latitude of 27 degrees south - considerably closer to the equator. I don't have air-con - I live in a double brick house which is adequately shaded on the sides by trees/garden, and has high enough ceilings to allow natural ventilation to keep it cool. In the hottest weeks, I use a pedestal fan, and I work from home so I don't have to wear a suit, which is entirely inappropriate for this climate. Excluding hot water usage, The 3 kw of solar electric panels I had installed on my roof last August have so far generated a bit more power than I actually use for cooking, lighting and general power. The panels cover about 50% of the north side of my roof - Could easily add more capacity if it were needed.
Solar does work - it just takes a bit of an investment to get it going. ($15k in my case, but I only paid $10k because of government subsidies here.)
You just need appropriately designed buildings so your total energy needs are reduced. In my case, my house predates air-conditioning, being built in the 1950's, so was already designed to be cool in summer with 10" ceilings, and double brick walls and north side verandas and trees etc. to shade the sunny side. It also has a wood burnign fireplace, but I generally only use ot a couple of times a year - it doesn't really get cold enough here compared to the hassle of cleaning it out. (Nice for toasting marshmallows or for a romantic evening, if it's cold enough.) I generally get enough wood for it from tree trimmings round my yard.
There are three strongly limiting factors when breathing compressed air, that makes me really doubt that submarines have a pressurised atmosphere significantly greater than 1 atmosphere when they dive. These are: 1) Breathing air at > 1 atmpsphere pressure means you would be absorbing nitrogen, and for the long dimes that submarines can stay under water, you would easily reach saturation levels which would require long decompression stops when surfacing, or else risk giving the entire crew the bends. 2) At even relatively shallow depths, you start sufferig the effects of nitrogen narcosis - if you were breathing air at 3 atmospheres, which is the equivalent depth of 20 meters of water, the effects of nitrogen narcosis would already be being felt - causing your reactions to slow, your thinking to start becomign coudy, and your judgement possibly impaired. These effects increase the deeper you go. 3) At greater depths, 60 meters or more, the pressure would be 7 atmospheres, and the partial pressure of oxygen (20% of the air) is 1.4 atmospheres. At this concentration or higher, oxygen is toxic and you can suffer the effects of oxygen toxicity in as little as a few minutes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity#Signs_and_symptoms
Even if you kept the pressure to say, 4 atmospheres, the equivalent pressure that 30 meters of water places on it, this would only allow the sub to dive 30 meters deeper than if it was kept at one atmosphere - so there is no real advantage in pressurising the air inside the sub, and a lot of disadvantages.
I think your nocturnal bladder pressure was caused by something else.
Actually there's a little more to it than that - lung expansion injuries are only one of the dangers divers face. The real decompression problem is that nitrogen in the air is absorbed into body tissues at depth. If you absorb too much nitrogen it takes a long time to release it again without causing bubbles. Bubbles of nitrogen in your blood cause blockages and clots, which are not very nice.
Whales and dolphins are also absorbing nitrogen from tha air compressed in their lungs, (it's 1 atmosphere at the surace but gets compressed another atmosphere for every 10 meters deep they go) but usually adopt dive profiles that allow the absorbed nitrogen to escape safely without causing bubbles - deepest part of the dive first, then going up to shallower depths progressively.
I would never say it's impossible, but I don't buy into "there are so many stars in the universe, odds support at least one of them having intelligent life". There are googillions of grains of sand, too, but large quantities of anything don't automatically force a higher probability of any grain of sand containing intelligent life.
If one of those sands of grain was known had evolved intelligent life though, it's a pretty good bet that there would be others as yet unknown grains of sand on that beach that also had intelligent life.
Being a pressure hull, it will be at 1 atmosphere internally - there is no decompression for the occupants to worry about, which is the whole point of having a pressure hull.
Last I checked, 37000 is > 35838 feet, which is the actual deepest point in the ocean, so the sub is already overrated for even the deepest depth - let alone the rest of the ocean which is much much shallower - with an average depth of about 13000 ft.
The wreck of the titanic is at only 12600ft. I'd definitely pay a decent sum to go see that thing in a sub if the sub had a decent view-port you could look out of.
I used to be obsessed with gaming - then one day I woke up and decided I should be spending a few hours a day leveling myself up instead of hours a day leveling up some virtual toon.
Now I spend about 1 to 2 hours a day doing the following: Getting physically fit by hitting the gym, cycling and sailing, and acquiring a real world skill like playing an instrument (Piano,guitar). it's much more reqardign than spending hours and hours leveling up a virtual toon in a virtual world so I could get the uber sword of whatever from the in WoW - for one thing I know it's not all going to be for nothing as soon as the next expansion pack comes out.
Now I get out on the weekends and meet real people too, which sure beats reading trade chat.
These term that Google has to meet should be standard terms that ALL companies who collect information have to meet - especially the one about having to obtain user consent before sharing a user's private information with third parties.
Average energy use for my house used to be about 20kwh per day, before I went solar - about 1/3 of that is for hot water (I have an immersion heater hot water system that uses off peak electricity)
I have put 3kw worth of solar panels on my house - I seem to be getting an average of about 12 kwh per day, though that can be as high as 18Kwh on a sunny day in summer, and as low as 6 kwh on a very rainy day. I also went through and changed a bunch of bulbs to CF, and started being a bit more sensible about my power usage - my bar fridge only goes on during the weekend, and I no longer leave my PC running 24/7 - I now actually turn it off at night. (I am a software engineer and work from home)
The system cost for my 3KW of panels and 2.8kw inverter and installation was a total of about $15000, but there's a rebate system in place where I live, and so I only spent $9600 - the rest was paid by the rebate. My house is probably worth $350k or more, so the $15000 cost of the panels is well under 5% of the total value of the house. In fact, the doors sliding glass windows probably cost more than the panels.
My power meter now has two measurements - inbound power received, and outbound power that is pumped onto the grid. So far, I have actually put more power back onto the grid than my house uses, and I get paid more for that power that goes back onto the grid than the power that I use, so I am making a quite tidy profit from the panels now - I estimate about a 15% return on investment - tax free.
The power I am generating is produced during peak times, so helps reduce the number of power plants needed to meet peak demand. On hot sunny days when people have their AC cranked, I am putting out the most power. (I don't have AC myself - my 2 storey house has plenty of insulation, with the sides of the house well shaded by a deck and trees etc. With the windows open and a little breeze and a few fans, I find it quite comfortable even on 35 deg Celsius days.
If every new house cost an additional %5. but had solar panels installed, it would go a long way to reducing the energy we all use for domestic purposes. If and when electric cars become viable, I will be buying one, and slapping another kw of panels on my roof to cover the charging of it too. Next major step for me is to dump the immersion heater hot water system and get either a solar hot water heater, or a heat pump based one.
This is how we can make a big dent in the 36% of power which is used for domestic. With electric cars, you can start making a dent in the 27% of power which is used for transport too. You can even make money while doing so if you are willing to make the investment.
You are not quite comparing apples to apples. 12VDC at 10A would only be 120W of power - not enough to run most desktops. At 120VAC, this would only be 1A.
120VAC like used in US houses is supplied at something like 15 to 20A. (I live in Australia - household power here is 240v, 10A.)
If you needed to supply enough DC for several computers, TV's, and pretty much anything which doesn't have a high power motor or heating element in it, you would need to be able to supply a lot more than 120 Watts. My PC + monitors alone are drawing 280 Watts.
So say you wanted a household DC supply that needed to be able to provide a 12v rail at 600 Watts - possibly just enough to run two computers and monitors. The current needed would be 50 Amps - and you would need wiring that's about thick as car jumper leads.
This would make wiring very expensive. There is also an additional danger of having such large currents - it is a lot easier to have a fire due to resistive heating of a weak connection or damaged wire.
I work from home, spend a lot of time looking up documentation on the net, and have a nephew at Uni living here who seems to be on WoW or some other game almost continuously, yet my bandwidth usage is still only around 28 GB down and 290 GB up. That also includes watching a fair bit of youtube, using Skype as my main phone and my nephew downloading a Steam game or two. Before my nephew moved in I would typically use perhaps 10 to 15 GB GB a month. I recently had my bandwidth cap increased from 50 GB to 200 GB and really, I just don't see myself using anywhere near that, unless I start really downloading a lot of high definition movies or something. My measured speed is about 18 Mbit down and 0.8 Mbit up, compared to the theoretical "up to 20 Mbit down and 1 Mbit up" plan I am on for $60 a month - so overall, I am pretty happy.
A 360p video on youtube seems to transfer down at about 1 Mbit/sec, after the initial burst, with the amount downloaded staying a slightly increasing rate faster than the playback. using bandwidth at 1Mbit/sec, you would use about 60*60*24 / 8 GBytes per day, ie. 10.8 GB / day. This works out to about 328.7 GBytes / month, if you did nothing but watch new youtube videos (so you were never replaying any from cache) and did that for every hour of the day, continuously. A 150 GB cap would let you watch youtube for 10.9 hours a day, every day, assuming you were keeping new streams constantly playing, with no breaks and no repeats.
America - land of the free. Hahahaha - what a joke. wake up people. Time to make a stand against this kind of crap. The lawyers and corporations have the country stitched up, and each year more laws are passed which gradually change the government from one that represents the people to one that only represents special interest groups and those with the biggest pile of money. Don't let such a fine country slip into the mud.
Its almost as bad here (Aus) but thankfully we are still a step or two behind.
Serves the little sh*ts right. It takes no great skill to set up something like this - it only takes the willingness to be an aesehole who wants to leech off others, and perhaps an html for dummies book.
If I was driving a car that is spraying oil all over the road, then I would certainly want to be stopped before I ended up having a crash caused by the oil, or before I caused some other driver to crash.
Likewise, if you have a computer that is virus ridden and actively infecting others enough so that an ISP can spot it, it should be locked off from the internet - it saves other computers from getting infected, and also lets the user know he better hurry up and recover what data he can off the thing before it's completely hosed, or he suffers (more) identity theft.
ISP's should not be held legally accountable if they fail to block access to an infected computer, but they should certainly be required to have some system in place to at least tries to notify owners that have infected computers. The ISP is in the best position to see if a user's machine is spewing out traffic on ports that are known to be used by certain security threats, and here in Australia they are already counting the bytes that go past and in most cases shaping your traffic once you hit a limit - perhaps your connection could just be slowed down to a really really slow crawl once you start spewing out traffic that looks like you no longer own your PC.
Keep up, will you? The water, which is the lifeblood of living things, came out of stones.
I wonder how much this removal of water from the rocks depends on the earth having a hot mantle? If the mantle were cooler, then the water would stay there instead of being cooked out as steam and being able to re-condense else where. This is massively speculative of course - but could part of the reason mars no longer has a liquid ocean be that since the planet has cooled now, all it's water is locked up back in the rocks again? Is the fact that we have a hot interior on our planet the main driving factor that allows us to have a liquid ocean?
Transition from C++ to Java or C# is not just possible, it is trivial. It is the transition the other way round that is problematic, as you suddenly have to start worrying what happens to every variable you have declared dynamically instead of letting the garbage collector deal with it.
The biggest barriers when changing languages however is not the actual languages - it is knowing which associated APIs and functions exist that do what you need, and which code has to be written, so you don't end up reinventing the wheel. Fortunately, if you are halfway decent at using a search engine you can find the answers you need quite rapidly - it is all a matter of knowing how to ask the right question. Although you could argue that you would not want a programmer that depends on using a search engine to know which functions to use to write a program, with the rate of change in APIs, it is all but impossible to keep on top of everything that is available without being good at using searches to find what you need to know, rather than depending on remembering everything yourself.
It also means you are much more capable of working in the next shiny new API and tool set, if it is decently documented. (And if it isn't, why are you using it?)
I forgot to mention - The game is actually pretty fun to play in the early stages - it's one really huge world, with all players in the one world, not split into multiple servers like WoW is. The game makers make money from repairs, which are relatively cheap - the jackpot money comes from money you spend on ammo, so on average in theory, it should only cost you repair money to play. The trick is to play efficiently - you can buy a rocket launcher and the best armor money can buy (several thousand real USD) and go hunting hte biggest stuff, but you will be so unskilled you will miss a lot and take more damagem so your returns will be very poor. Also if you go using a rocket launcher to hunt the equivalent of bunnies, you will certainly kill them (massive overkill actually) , but the ammo cost will be prohibitive compared to what any potential drop is that a bunny would drop, so you have to match up your skill with a suitable weapon you can use efficiently, and hunt creatures you can kill without taking too much damage, and without doing massive overkill on the creature, which wastes money. I ended up having a quite complex spreadsheet to work out the kill odds and average drops so I had a better idea of what I should be hunting, and what I should be using in the way of weapons. I think most other players do a lot of heavy analytics like this too, unless they have money to burn and want to just run around blowing stuff up without worrying too much about being efficient. There's also mining and crafting too, which works on a similar system. eg. you can be crafting say, some kind of shirt, which might use $1 worth of materials, and be able to sell for an average of $0.90, but sometimes you will craft 10 shirts but only use 1 short worth of materials, if you have good enough skill and luck.
Basically a glorified poker machine - you can theoretically play for free if you are happy to wander around in your orange noob jumpsuit forever, collecting dung and "sweat" from animals which you can sell to other players that need the stuff to improve player bought land areas and for making a kind of mind essence for doing psionic type abilities. There are no quests - though there are various special hunt events etc you can participate in if you can raise the coin to buy the beacon that start it. To really enjoy playing the game you have to deposit USD which have a 10:1 to the in-game currency, Project Entropian Dollars aka "PED". YOu can also cash out - convert the in-game currency back to USD, with the option to also get a debit card you can use like a regular bank card in the real world.
Ammo costs money & so do repairs on your gear, but the ammo spent in killing mobs is recycled into the "loot pool" which basically gives a random payout when you kill a mob - typically less than what it costs to kill the creature, but occasionally a lot more. If you are lucky you get a really big jackpoy (um I mean loot drop) and the biggest winners are announced in the "hall of fame".
I got turned off the game because of this element, and frankly, because it was pretty boring without any quests - but the other players were great - good to talk to and generally a mature attitude all round. The in game market is very intense - more like a real stock market, because there is real dollar value on everything that it bought and sold. Some savvy players are able to support their hunting habit with just in-game trading, but frankly, for the amount of effort it takes to get ahead of the game, you might as well be investing in the real stock market, or just work an extra hour overtime and deposit that in.
The society (like a guild) I started still exists - "Antipodean Army" - and is now run by Serica who has much more time to play the game than I ever could afford.
I would absolutely agree. I tend to be the follower type, happy to do as I am told rather than the leader type coming up with the big plan, so to get some experience in a leadership role, I started a guild in another game (not WoW, but one that tends to attract more players in the 30+ age group) specifically for this purpose. It was an interesting experience, and I was surprised at how willing people are to take direction from a leader and have the burden of decision making taken off their shoulders. I also learnt a lot about resolving group conflicts and expectation management.
Overall the experience greatly increased confidence in my ability to lead a group. Another thing I learnt was that often it doesn't matter what decision you make - right or wrong - as long as you make one and accept the consequences, rather than dithering and doing nothing.
Even if there were not, that would only be an issue of quality, not functionality. The same tech would work with lower refresh rates, only it would not be as smooth. Synchronizing of the shutter glasses is trivial - it would be done with a bluetooth signal from the PC to sync them, or do it the old school way like the ancient pair of shutter glasses I have in my box of junk from 1999, have a wire that plugs in directly to the video card.
It would also be very easy to make an add on box that sits between two video card connections and the display, which would be used to combine two separate video card outputs into a single output, alternating which display was seen on the single screen, with a syncing signal that went to the shutter glasses.
With such a box you would not even have to have a specialized video card - just two regular video card outputs, effectively converting a dual head display into a single head display on one monitor, but player 1 seeing screen 1 and player 2 seeing screen 2.
I thought patents were not supposed to be awardable if they are "obvious to an person of ordinary skill in the art."
I am no expert, and I haven't even bothered to read TFA but if someone asked me "how can we make it possible for two players share the same screen", in the time it took me to read the above summary and click through to this page, (about 2 seconds) I can think of the following possible solutions:
1) Have each player wear shutter glasses that lets each see alternating frames. or another solution: 2) have a second whole screen LCD cover - ie. essentially one giant screen sized pixel that covers the entire screen area. Each player would wear polarized glasses that are polarized 90 degrees to each other. Liquid crystals rotate the angle of polarization by 90 degrees when turned on, so this would make the direction of polarization shift by 90 degrees every odd frame. so if I can think of these solutions, as I am sure just about anyone else here could, doesn't this make it fail the "obvious" part of the requirement to get a patent?
Now to read that article and see what cunning technical solution they have come up with...
Slashdot Mirror
I live on the Gold Coast at a latitude of 27 degrees south - considerably closer to the equator. I don't have air-con - I live in a double brick house which is adequately shaded on the sides by trees/garden, and has high enough ceilings to allow natural ventilation to keep it cool. In the hottest weeks, I use a pedestal fan, and I work from home so I don't have to wear a suit, which is entirely inappropriate for this climate. Excluding hot water usage, The 3 kw of solar electric panels I had installed on my roof last August have so far generated a bit more power than I actually use for cooking, lighting and general power. The panels cover about 50% of the north side of my roof - Could easily add more capacity if it were needed.
Solar does work - it just takes a bit of an investment to get it going. ($15k in my case, but I only paid $10k because of government subsidies here.)
You just need appropriately designed buildings so your total energy needs are reduced. In my case, my house predates air-conditioning, being built in the 1950's, so was already designed to be cool in summer with 10" ceilings, and double brick walls and north side verandas and trees etc. to shade the sunny side. It also has a wood burnign fireplace, but I generally only use ot a couple of times a year - it doesn't really get cold enough here compared to the hassle of cleaning it out. (Nice for toasting marshmallows or for a romantic evening, if it's cold enough.) I generally get enough wood for it from tree trimmings round my yard.
There are three strongly limiting factors when breathing compressed air, that makes me really doubt that submarines have a pressurised atmosphere significantly greater than 1 atmosphere when they dive.
These are:
1) Breathing air at > 1 atmpsphere pressure means you would be absorbing nitrogen, and for the long dimes that submarines can stay under water, you would easily reach saturation levels which would require long decompression stops when surfacing, or else risk giving the entire crew the bends.
2) At even relatively shallow depths, you start sufferig the effects of nitrogen narcosis - if you were breathing air at 3 atmospheres, which is the equivalent depth of 20 meters of water, the effects of nitrogen narcosis would already be being felt - causing your reactions to slow, your thinking to start becomign coudy, and your judgement possibly impaired. These effects increase the deeper you go.
3) At greater depths, 60 meters or more, the pressure would be 7 atmospheres, and the partial pressure of oxygen (20% of the air) is 1.4 atmospheres. At this concentration or higher, oxygen is toxic and you can suffer the effects of oxygen toxicity in as little as a few minutes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity#Signs_and_symptoms
Even if you kept the pressure to say, 4 atmospheres, the equivalent pressure that 30 meters of water places on it, this would only allow the sub to dive 30 meters deeper than if it was kept at one atmosphere - so there is no real advantage in pressurising the air inside the sub, and a lot of disadvantages.
I think your nocturnal bladder pressure was caused by something else.
Actually there's a little more to it than that - lung expansion injuries are only one of the dangers divers face.
The real decompression problem is that nitrogen in the air is absorbed into body tissues at depth. If you absorb too much nitrogen it takes a long time to release it again without causing bubbles. Bubbles of nitrogen in your blood cause blockages and clots, which are not very nice.
Whales and dolphins are also absorbing nitrogen from tha air compressed in their lungs, (it's 1 atmosphere at the surace but gets compressed another atmosphere for every 10 meters deep they go) but usually adopt dive profiles that allow the absorbed nitrogen to escape safely without causing bubbles - deepest part of the dive first, then going up to shallower depths progressively.
Whales however can get bent - http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2007/12/14-02.html apparently, if they come up too fast after being scared by sonar.
Since he got caught plagiarizing, he failed at cheating anyway, as well as not writing a passing paper, so still fails on both accounts.
Ah - grains of sand, that is.
I would never say it's impossible, but I don't buy into "there are so many stars in the universe, odds support at least one of them having intelligent life". There are googillions of grains of sand, too, but large quantities of anything don't automatically force a higher probability of any grain of sand containing intelligent life.
If one of those sands of grain was known had evolved intelligent life though, it's a pretty good bet that there would be others as yet unknown grains of sand on that beach that also had intelligent life.
Being a pressure hull, it will be at 1 atmosphere internally - there is no decompression for the occupants to worry about, which is the whole point of having a pressure hull.
Last I checked, 37000 is > 35838 feet, which is the actual deepest point in the ocean, so the sub is already overrated for even the deepest depth - let alone the rest of the ocean which is much much shallower - with an average depth of about 13000 ft.
The wreck of the titanic is at only 12600ft. I'd definitely pay a decent sum to go see that thing in a sub if the sub had a decent view-port you could look out of.
I used to be obsessed with gaming - then one day I woke up and decided I should be spending a few hours a day leveling myself up instead of hours a day leveling up some virtual toon.
Now I spend about 1 to 2 hours a day doing the following: Getting physically fit by hitting the gym, cycling and sailing, and acquiring a real world skill like playing an instrument (Piano,guitar).
it's much more reqardign than spending hours and hours leveling up a virtual toon in a virtual world so I could get the uber sword of whatever from the in WoW - for one thing I know it's not all going to be for nothing as soon as the next expansion pack comes out.
Now I get out on the weekends and meet real people too, which sure beats reading trade chat.
I don't miss online gaming at all.
These term that Google has to meet should be standard terms that ALL companies who collect information have to meet - especially the one about having to obtain user consent before sharing a user's private information with third parties.
About 36% of energy use is for domestic purposes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption
Average energy use for my house used to be about 20kwh per day, before I went solar - about 1/3 of that is for hot water (I have an immersion heater hot water system that uses off peak electricity)
I have put 3kw worth of solar panels on my house - I seem to be getting an average of about 12 kwh per day, though that can be as high as 18Kwh on a sunny day in summer, and as low as 6 kwh on a very rainy day. I also went through and changed a bunch of bulbs to CF, and started being a bit more sensible about my power usage - my bar fridge only goes on during the weekend, and I no longer leave my PC running 24/7 - I now actually turn it off at night. (I am a software engineer and work from home)
The system cost for my 3KW of panels and 2.8kw inverter and installation was a total of about $15000, but there's a rebate system in place where I live, and so I only spent $9600 - the rest was paid by the rebate. My house is probably worth $350k or more, so the $15000 cost of the panels is well under 5% of the total value of the house. In fact, the doors sliding glass windows probably cost more than the panels.
My power meter now has two measurements - inbound power received, and outbound power that is pumped onto the grid. So far, I have actually put more power back onto the grid than my house uses, and I get paid more for that power that goes back onto the grid than the power that I use, so I am making a quite tidy profit from the panels now - I estimate about a 15% return on investment - tax free.
The power I am generating is produced during peak times, so helps reduce the number of power plants needed to meet peak demand. On hot sunny days when people have their AC cranked, I am putting out the most power. (I don't have AC myself - my 2 storey house has plenty of insulation, with the sides of the house well shaded by a deck and trees etc. With the windows open and a little breeze and a few fans, I find it quite comfortable even on 35 deg Celsius days.
If every new house cost an additional %5. but had solar panels installed, it would go a long way to reducing the energy we all use for domestic purposes.
If and when electric cars become viable, I will be buying one, and slapping another kw of panels on my roof to cover the charging of it too.
Next major step for me is to dump the immersion heater hot water system and get either a solar hot water heater, or a heat pump based one.
This is how we can make a big dent in the 36% of power which is used for domestic. With electric cars, you can start making a dent in the 27% of power which is used for transport too. You can even make money while doing so if you are willing to make the investment.
You are not quite comparing apples to apples. 12VDC at 10A would only be 120W of power - not enough to run most desktops.
At 120VAC, this would only be 1A.
120VAC like used in US houses is supplied at something like 15 to 20A. (I live in Australia - household power here is 240v, 10A.)
If you needed to supply enough DC for several computers, TV's, and pretty much anything which doesn't have a high power motor or heating element in it, you would need to be able to supply a lot more than 120 Watts. My PC + monitors alone are drawing 280 Watts.
So say you wanted a household DC supply that needed to be able to provide a 12v rail at 600 Watts - possibly just enough to run two computers and monitors.
The current needed would be 50 Amps - and you would need wiring that's about thick as car jumper leads.
This would make wiring very expensive. There is also an additional danger of having such large currents - it is a lot easier to have a fire due to resistive heating of a weak connection or damaged wire.
I work from home, spend a lot of time looking up documentation on the net, and have a nephew at Uni living here who seems to be on WoW or some other game almost continuously, yet my bandwidth usage is still only around 28 GB down and 290 GB up. That also includes watching a fair bit of youtube, using Skype as my main phone and my nephew downloading a Steam game or two. Before my nephew moved in I would typically use perhaps 10 to 15 GB GB a month.
I recently had my bandwidth cap increased from 50 GB to 200 GB and really, I just don't see myself using anywhere near that, unless I start really downloading a lot of high definition movies or something. My measured speed is about 18 Mbit down and 0.8 Mbit up, compared to the theoretical "up to 20 Mbit down and 1 Mbit up" plan I am on for $60 a month - so overall, I am pretty happy.
A 360p video on youtube seems to transfer down at about 1 Mbit/sec, after the initial burst, with the amount downloaded staying a slightly increasing rate faster than the playback.
using bandwidth at 1Mbit/sec, you would use about 60*60*24 / 8 GBytes per day, ie. 10.8 GB / day.
This works out to about 328.7 GBytes / month, if you did nothing but watch new youtube videos (so you were never replaying any from cache) and did that for every hour of the day, continuously. A 150 GB cap would let you watch youtube for 10.9 hours a day, every day, assuming you were keeping new streams constantly playing, with no breaks and no repeats.
I'm no rocket scientist but I'd guess his acceleration was around 9.8 ms^2 down?
9.8 ms ^ -2 that is...
I'm no rocket scientist but I'd guess his acceleration was around 9.8 ms^2 down?
America - land of the free. Hahahaha - what a joke. wake up people. Time to make a stand against this kind of crap.
The lawyers and corporations have the country stitched up, and each year more laws are passed which gradually change the government from one that represents the people to one that only represents special interest groups and those with the biggest pile of money. Don't let such a fine country slip into the mud.
Its almost as bad here (Aus) but thankfully we are still a step or two behind.
Bwahhahahahaha
Serves the little sh*ts right. It takes no great skill to set up something like this - it only takes the willingness to be an aesehole who wants to leech off others, and perhaps an html for dummies book.
If I was driving a car that is spraying oil all over the road, then I would certainly want to be stopped before I ended up having a crash caused by the oil, or before I caused some other driver to crash.
Likewise, if you have a computer that is virus ridden and actively infecting others enough so that an ISP can spot it, it should be locked off from the internet - it saves other computers from getting infected, and also lets the user know he better hurry up and recover what data he can off the thing before it's completely hosed, or he suffers (more) identity theft.
ISP's should not be held legally accountable if they fail to block access to an infected computer, but they should certainly be required to have some system in place to at least tries to notify owners that have infected computers. The ISP is in the best position to see if a user's machine is spewing out traffic on ports that are known to be used by certain security threats, and here in Australia they are already counting the bytes that go past and in most cases shaping your traffic once you hit a limit - perhaps your connection could just be slowed down to a really really slow crawl once you start spewing out traffic that looks like you no longer own your PC.
Keep up, will you? The water, which is the lifeblood of living things, came out of stones.
I wonder how much this removal of water from the rocks depends on the earth having a hot mantle? If the mantle were cooler, then the water would stay there instead of being cooked out as steam and being able to re-condense else where. This is massively speculative of course - but could part of the reason mars no longer has a liquid ocean be that since the planet has cooled now, all it's water is locked up back in the rocks again? Is the fact that we have a hot interior on our planet the main driving factor that allows us to have a liquid ocean?
Transition from C++ to Java or C# is not just possible, it is trivial.
It is the transition the other way round that is problematic, as you suddenly have to start worrying what happens to every variable you have declared dynamically instead of letting the garbage collector deal with it.
The biggest barriers when changing languages however is not the actual languages - it is knowing which associated APIs and functions exist that do what you need, and which code has to be written, so you don't end up reinventing the wheel. Fortunately, if you are halfway decent at using a search engine you can find the answers you need quite rapidly - it is all a matter of knowing how to ask the right question. Although you could argue that you would not want a programmer that depends on using a search engine to know which functions to use to write a program, with the rate of change in APIs, it is all but impossible to keep on top of everything that is available without being good at using searches to find what you need to know, rather than depending on remembering everything yourself.
It also means you are much more capable of working in the next shiny new API and tool set, if it is decently documented. (And if it isn't, why are you using it?)
I forgot to mention - The game is actually pretty fun to play in the early stages - it's one really huge world, with all players in the one world, not split into multiple servers like WoW is.
The game makers make money from repairs, which are relatively cheap - the jackpot money comes from money you spend on ammo, so on average in theory, it should only cost you repair money to play.
The trick is to play efficiently - you can buy a rocket launcher and the best armor money can buy (several thousand real USD) and go hunting hte biggest stuff, but you will be so unskilled you will miss a lot and take more damagem so your returns will be very poor.
Also if you go using a rocket launcher to hunt the equivalent of bunnies, you will certainly kill them (massive overkill actually) , but the ammo cost will be prohibitive compared to what any potential drop is that a bunny would drop, so you have to match up your skill with a suitable weapon you can use efficiently, and hunt creatures you can kill without taking too much damage, and without doing massive overkill on the creature, which wastes money.
I ended up having a quite complex spreadsheet to work out the kill odds and average drops so I had a better idea of what I should be hunting, and what I should be using in the way of weapons. I think most other players do a lot of heavy analytics like this too, unless they have money to burn and want to just run around blowing stuff up without worrying too much about being efficient.
There's also mining and crafting too, which works on a similar system. eg. you can be crafting say, some kind of shirt, which might use $1 worth of materials, and be able to sell for an average of $0.90, but sometimes you will craft 10 shirts but only use 1 short worth of materials, if you have good enough skill and luck.
The game was Entropia universe, aka Project Entropia.
http://www.entropiauniverse.com/
Basically a glorified poker machine - you can theoretically play for free if you are happy to wander around in your orange noob jumpsuit forever, collecting dung and "sweat" from animals which you can sell to other players that need the stuff to improve player bought land areas and for making a kind of mind essence for doing psionic type abilities. There are no quests - though there are various special hunt events etc you can participate in if you can raise the coin to buy the beacon that start it. To really enjoy playing the game you have to deposit USD which have a 10:1 to the in-game currency, Project Entropian Dollars aka "PED". YOu can also cash out - convert the in-game currency back to USD, with the option to also get a debit card you can use like a regular bank card in the real world.
Ammo costs money & so do repairs on your gear, but the ammo spent in killing mobs is recycled into the "loot pool" which basically gives a random payout when you kill a mob - typically less than what it costs to kill the creature, but occasionally a lot more. If you are lucky you get a really big jackpoy (um I mean loot drop) and the biggest winners are announced in the "hall of fame".
I got turned off the game because of this element, and frankly, because it was pretty boring without any quests - but the other players were great - good to talk to and generally a mature attitude all round. The in game market is very intense - more like a real stock market, because there is real dollar value on everything that it bought and sold. Some savvy players are able to support their hunting habit with just in-game trading, but frankly, for the amount of effort it takes to get ahead of the game, you might as well be investing in the real stock market, or just work an extra hour overtime and deposit that in.
The society (like a guild) I started still exists - "Antipodean Army" - and is now run by Serica who has much more time to play the game than I ever could afford.
You have done toe conversion wrong.
Its not 30 square Kilometers, it is a thousandth of that size - 30,000 Square meters.
30 Square Kilometers means 30 * 1000 * 1000 meters, or 30,000,000 Square meters - not 30 square kilometers.
I would absolutely agree.
I tend to be the follower type, happy to do as I am told rather than the leader type coming up with the big plan, so to get some experience in a leadership role, I started a guild in another game (not WoW, but one that tends to attract more players in the 30+ age group) specifically for this purpose. It was an interesting experience, and I was surprised at how willing people are to take direction from a leader and have the burden of decision making taken off their shoulders. I also learnt a lot about resolving group conflicts and expectation management.
Overall the experience greatly increased confidence in my ability to lead a group. Another thing I learnt was that often it doesn't matter what decision you make - right or wrong - as long as you make one and accept the consequences, rather than dithering and doing nothing.
A quick search in Google revelals there are already some TVs capable of 240Hz:
http://reviews.lcdtvbuyingguide.com/lg-lcd-tv/lg-47le8500.html
Even if there were not, that would only be an issue of quality, not functionality. The same tech would work with lower refresh rates, only it would not be as smooth.
Synchronizing of the shutter glasses is trivial - it would be done with a bluetooth signal from the PC to sync them, or do it the old school way like the ancient pair of shutter glasses I have in my box of junk from 1999, have a wire that plugs in directly to the video card.
It would also be very easy to make an add on box that sits between two video card connections and the display, which would be used to combine two separate video card outputs into a single output, alternating which display was seen on the single screen, with a syncing signal that went to the shutter glasses.
With such a box you would not even have to have a specialized video card - just two regular video card outputs, effectively converting a dual head display into a single head display on one monitor, but player 1 seeing screen 1 and player 2 seeing screen 2.
That enough additional detail for you?
I thought patents were not supposed to be awardable if they are "obvious to an person of ordinary skill in the art."
I am no expert, and I haven't even bothered to read TFA but if someone asked me "how can we make it possible for two players share the same screen", in the time it took me to read the above summary and click through to this page, (about 2 seconds) I can think of the following possible solutions:
1) Have each player wear shutter glasses that lets each see alternating frames.
or another solution:
2) have a second whole screen LCD cover - ie. essentially one giant screen sized pixel that covers the entire screen area. Each player would wear polarized glasses that are polarized 90 degrees to each other. Liquid crystals rotate the angle of polarization by 90 degrees when turned on, so this would make the direction of polarization shift by 90 degrees every odd frame.
so if I can think of these solutions, as I am sure just about anyone else here could, doesn't this make it fail the "obvious" part of the requirement to get a patent?
Now to read that article and see what cunning technical solution they have come up with...