I suggest staying with tried and true stuff (X10, Levitton)
I would advise against X10 because of some serous limitations in that protocol - its open loop, meaning you can't query the state of lights, no guaranteed delivery of messages to lights/appliances, and a limit of 4 active controllers (i.e. things that can both receive and transmit messages) in a system (any more than that and the signal gets pulled to ground too much, due to the design of the transmitters.)
I wrote an X10 bridge to convert TCP messages to X10 messages via an X10 computer interface kit and it was a real pain dealing with lack of feedback from messages - the best I could do was have the server/bridge remember the last states that had been set, and issue multiple transmissions of a message. The protocol actually specifies that each message is sent twice anyway, but there is no collision detection or retry/back-off etc so it's not that much of a certainty that your messages will get through. Whats worse, is of you have controller devices sending messages to the same device, if controller A tells the device to turn on and then controller B tells it to turn off, controller A will still think it's turned on.
The X10 protocol is also very slow and unresponsive - it takes a second or so for a device to respond to a message, which is not good when you are used to being able to instantly turn a light on or off with a switch.
Think of all that infra-red radiation flying around from all those remotes too. Infra-red radiation can blind you! and your oven grill uses it to cook your steak so it must be dangerous!
I have My Mum on GNU/Linux (hereby referred to as Linux for brevity) too - she's no rocket scientist - in fact, she can often be found cursing the "stupid computer" for deleting that spreadsheet row or whatever, but as far as doing the things she needs to do, i.e. use a spreadsheet to do her tax, write emails and letters, surf the web, and download/view photos from her digital camera, it works great. Oh - and she thinks gnome's solitaire and other card games are far better than Microsoft's Solitaire.
She's 73, and loves Linux in that it does what she needs it to do, and she hasn't had any of the horror story encounters with computer viruses etc. that her friends have had. And since she lives 40k away, she also loves it that when she does have a problem (cant find a file, needs to check something on her desktop when she's away from her house, etc.) I can always log in remotely to it and help her out.
Best of all, there hasn't been a major revolution in the way the gnome desktop works every 3 to 5 years - things are still pretty much the same and likely to still be available the same (despite whatever extra candy may get added in alternate desktops) another 5 years. This makes for a hapy mum - not having to relearn how to do everything over and over again. The last thing she needs is a whole new ribbon paradigm, followed by whatever the next big thing is after that. She's not alone - she has friends - and they talk to each other. I think there's a gradually swelling anti-Microsoft gray movement building.
Its when there is a growing user base like this that, that Microsoft should be worried - and probably is.
People wouldn't have to vote on every little thing - just the things they want to vote on. How many bills are put forward every year anyway? I tried to google for the info but it's a bit elusive.
I seem to recall Pierre Proudhon had a lot of ideas along the lines of "property is theft" and also had some rather dodgy philosophies regarding what should be done with people of Jewish origin. I don't know how he proposed land should be managed or who would decide how it should be distributed.
As the first Anarchist, I don't think he was exactly pro-democracy either. I would invite you to live in an anarchist society (Say, Somalia) and see how well anarchy works. I think that the France of Pierre Proudhon's era and modern developed democracies today are quite different too - for one the overall level of education is much higher, and for another, the general population is able to get much more information about the social political and economic condition of the country, and hence are much better informed. You have to remember that Pierre Proudhon was born not long after the chaos of the french revoltion, and France went through a rapid succession of various forms of govornment from republic to dictatorship to empire.
Direct democracy could work in countries that have a good standard of education and good communications networks. It wouldn't work well in countries without these things, but then, regular democracy doesnt seem to work too well there either.
Pure democracy degenerates into rule by rabble and oppression of minorities, unless the subset of voters is relatively small (See Athens). Do you have a reference, I'd be interested to read about it. (does Athens refer to democracy in ancient Greece?)
if I recall, the US became a republic because it didn't want to be a monarchy?
I certainly don't advocate having a public list of how you voted available for all to read. Your vote should be as anonymous as possible, but just like your fingerprints/skin cells on the ballot papers and potential hidden cameras in voting booths, there will always be a way to find out how you vote if someone wants to know badly enough - especially if that someone is in a govornmental position of authority.
The way to stop that is to have voting records strictly controlled, and also have solid laws about how the voting information can be used. Attempting to buy votes should be seen in the same light as attempting to bribe or blackmail someone, and barring someone from a job based on how they voted would be just as illegal as barring them based on religion, gender, origin or any other personal trait that doesn't directly affect their performance on the job.
You raise some valid concerns, but lets look at them: . I am sure you feel qualified to vote on a handful of issues that are close to your heart, but what about the other 99.9% of thing going on? Do you really hold your fellow countrymn in such low regard? I agree that no-one is likely to have the right answers for all issues, but isn't that already the case with existing legislators? How often have we heard about bills being barely read before they are voted on, or questioned the knowledge of lawmakers on issues we hold dear - like so many technology oriented pieces of legislation (say, for spam laws)? Even the lawmakers aer not infallible, and I don't think that the public would do that much worse on voting on these issues themselves. Sure, there may be some poor decisions made, but they would be OUR poor decisions, not those thrust upon us by a small group who may have been unduly influenced by lobbyists etc. After a year or so of finding out that actually you can't have free schooling AND no tax, I think pople would start taking a lot more interest in the process, and start making more appropriate decisions.
If a politician tosses out a bill and says 'vote for it and you will get more money' while ignoring the costs, do you really think that enough people will vote against it? I think that this is not as likely as you would think - for the same reason that we don't automatically vote for a politician that promises say, huge tax cuts or free money for everyone - there are enough voters who know that such promises are unfulfillable or unsustainable, so we don't vote that way.
The founding fathers didn't have everything right to start with - after all, they didnt think women were fit to vote at all (along with the rest of the world) , yet in the intervening time we have decided that mabey women can vote sensibly after all. One of the main resons you need so many intervening steps though, is the imposibility of collecting and counting votes by hand - you HAVE to have proxies when you don't have a means of hearing the voice of the people more often. This should no longer be the obstacle it was though, in this age of communications.
At the very least, even if we can't vote on every bill we should be able to directly show our support/non-support for a bill - electronic lobbying for the masses, if you will.
If it can be made to work reliably and securely, electronic voting is by far the best way to go as it offers the possibility of having a much more direct democracy instead of democracy-by-proxy as we have now.
Consider this. You only get one vote every few years, which is then supposed to show your support for every decision your elected representative makes. It would be much better if you could vote on all the major issues, such as major bills, decisions to start wars, etc. With a physical based voting system though, it would be all but impossible to do this as the amount of effort to collect votes is enormous - hence we have political representatives we vote for who act as proxies for our wishes, and hopefully make decisions that the majority of the people would wish for. As we all know, this is often not the case. (eg. Copyright extention)
Now that nearly everyone has a computer (in developed countries) or has easy access to one via internet cafe's, libraries, etc. then imagine what it would be like if you could directly vote (via te internet) on bills such as say, the patriot act or extending copyright, instead of having to depend on some guy to make that vote for you? Apart from anything else, it would take a lot of the current power away from special interest lobby groups (read:big business), as they would have to convince a large slice of the population on how to vote, instead of a small group of senators etc. You would still need a body of lawmakers to put forward bills and propositions, but the general public would have much greater control over the acceptance or rejection of those bills.
The challenge of course would be: 1) ensuring everyone only got one vote, (say, through the use of a hardware keygen or something) and 2) your votes remain anonymous. I don't personally believe this is as valuable as being able to vote on every bill, and would happily sacrifice a little theoretical anonymity for a more direct democracy.
If you get a Mac, you can put your copy of WinXP on it and not worry.
Iot if it's an OEM copy of windows (That I bought with the original hardware when I built the machines) - that will be locked to the mobo of the original system that you installed it on. Right now I have 3 OEM copies of Windows XP (with their respective keys) that are unusable because the original mobos they were on have died and been replaced after some nasty electrical storms. Hence those 3 machines (and another purpose built) are happily running various flavours of Linux. (and I decided I better invest in a decent UPS) I have no plans to ever buy another copy of Windows if I can possibly help it.
I'd like to know how having a million "tiny mirrors" is less wasteful than having a million pixels.
The real advantage this camera has is that you no longer need an array of sensors to capture a particular frequency of light. Current CCDs are really an array of pixels x 3, with one array per primary color (red,green,blue). Sure, for a regular visible light camera, a CCD is cheap to make, but with this device, if you wanted to measure some special part of the spectrum or had an unusually sensitive ( but very expensive) ccd you would only need one of them.
As you probably know, most cameras use 3 filters to capture the 3 frequencies of light close to what our eyes see - red green and blue. The part of our eyes that captures red light doesnt just capture one frequency - instead the "red filter" as it were, responds to a range of frequencies from dark red to yellowish. Likewise for green and blue, so actually we miss out on a lot of the information that is actually avaiable when looking at an object.
I imagine that with this camera, oneinteresting application woild be to directly capture full spectrum info for a scene. You could probably do something like focus the light for the single pixel sensor through a prism and create a apectrum, capturing each of the different frequency bands that way - so you would have a camera that is actually acting as a spectrograph for each individual pixel and thus capturing a lot more information than would be possible with a normal tri-filter camera.
In space applications though, cameras often capture qite different frequencies - infra red, uv, etc. With this camera, you could conceivably have an array of rather expensive specialised sensors, with each sensor being very good at capturing a particular wavelength - just as long as your mirror array can relfect all these.
Speed limits have to cater to the lowest common denominator. You might be perfectly safe driving in a 40 mph zone at 60mph in dry conditions, in your new car with traction control, ABS etc, especialy if you have lots of driving experience or extra training, but what about that other guy driving the old crappy 20 year old car with half bald tyres that he got as a retirement present, or worse, that guy who has just had his license a week, driving Dad's SUV in the rain?
A better system would be to have a base limit, (say, 40mph) and an additional max limit that is based on your car and experience AND the road conditions - that would apply to just you. With the additional proviso that if you are involved in any sort of accident over the base limit, or drive dangerously such as tailgating or excessive swerving/dodging, you get hit with a huge extra penalty.
Thus, if you really are a good driver in a good car and the road's empty or otherwise safe to drive at higher speeds, you would be allowed to - with huge penalties for abusing the extra leeway. Plus it would encourage drivers to actually get some advance driving skills and vehicles with decent handling characteristics.
Re:Preventing this kind of thing...
on
SQL Hacks
·
· Score: 1
It's obviously replacing non-pritning chars with null then doing something else with that in the translate and filter functions. The replace's are nested because there's no function to simply giv a range of values or array of values in the replace function.
If they had used Postgres or Oracle, you could have used a regular expression to replace all those posky non-printing characters with null.
Take up motorcycle racing, Sky diving, Bungee jumping, hangliding and underwater cave diving. One of those is sure to help you meet your goals if you try hard enough.
Also, bashing vegemite in public is not considered free speech.
Actually they dont even let you enjoy the wholesome goodness of vegemite in the US - thats the best reason to leave. Its illegal to import Vegemite into the US now, and they are searching people at the border for the stuff because it contains folate, which under US food laws is only allowed as an additive in breadstuffs for some reason.
I dont think you know the difference between arbitrage and stock touting. The difference is why the former is legal and the latter illegal.
Arbitrage is where you are buying and selling an instrument (say, shares, currency, a derivative or more "exotic" combination of shares and derivative)in two different markets or two equivalent instruments within the same market, at two different prices. Arbitrage is good for the global markets - it's net effect is to bring the value of the instrument in the two markets (or the equivalent instrument in the same market) into line. It's what keeps the price of say, yen at the same price in Tokyo and New York. Arbitrage investors invest millions to make thousands, at relatively low risk. (unless their name is Nick Leeon - but that's the exception rather than the rule)
Stock touting is damaging to the market because it artificially distorts the value of an instrument with no underlying basis, and reduces investor confidence in the market.
The wear and tear on a road surface is proportional to the fourth power of it's weight(see the section on maintenance) so actually a light fuel efficient vehicle should have to pay a lower price per gallon of fuel, or large vehicles pay a higher price per gallon.
eg. if you have a 1000 kg car compared to a 2000 kg car, then the 2000 kg car is causing 32 times as much wear on the road surface, so the road will need repairs much sooner. a 4000 kg car would be causing 256 times the wear.
As for planetariums and museums, those are valuable in that they inspire kids to take up careers in science. I can assure you, if there were an orbital habitat/lab with 500 or 1000 or even 50 scientists and astronauts beavering away at stuff in space at any one time, there would be no shortage of kids interested in getting into science with the possibly achievable goal of working in space someday.
As it is though, it's next to impossible for even the best of the best of the best to get more than a single short trip, after decades of training. Who wants to train to be an astronaut these days? I sure dont - and I love sci-fi and space flight and all that. Infact, if someone said I could swap my current career (programmer) for that of an astronaut with a single guaranteed flight in it somewhere, I still would'nt.
The thought of all that trining for only a few hours or days of glory and then an eternity on the ground again horrifies me. It must be hell for returned astronauts, knowing they have reached the pinnacle of their careers.
Yeah, we should do all our testing on animals only. Lots and lots of animals. Oh wait. Wasn't there a vocal group here not so long ago decrying animal testing?
So how many hours of CPU time do you devote to protein folding and simulation? How much would be needed to be able to simulate these drugs and all their complex interactions with the human body and with each other?
There is no simple solution for drug testing that will please everybody. We can't test everything on animals because it's cruel and also not a complete model for humans. We can't test everything on people because the early stages (way before this leve of trials) would often kill them. We don't have enough CPU power if we combined every computer on the planet to simulate a single drug in a human fully, so we have to use the best combination. Simulate what we can, then move to animal trials then finally to human trials when it looks safe enough.
At the very least though, we should expect that those that volunteer for drug tests are at least looked after properly when there are effects that will affect them permanently, like maiming, crippling of their immune systems or organs, or death.
If these guys just suffered temporary pain you could say "well they got $4000 so fairs fair" but they are suffering a lot more than that, and deserve a lot more compensation than $4000.
After all, we need people like these guys that will put their skins literally on the line to help develop tomorrow's cures and treatments. I personally am not prepared to volunteer for this stuff. I think it's a bit harsh to those that did volunteer to call them moronic or stupid just because they went into an experiment they were told would have minimal side effects.
the absolute best deal I have been able to find in Australia is $AU 40 a month for 512/128 "unlimited". Even then you get capped to 64k for the next 24 hours if you are in the top few percent of users (the really big leeches) for more than a couple of days. There are plans faster than 1500k in only a very few regions here. I wish I could get the UK deal. it sounds sweet. from what I heard (from friends over there) you get TV on demand + your line rental for that 30 quid too. 30 quid is chump change on a London salary.
Furthermore, several groups have looked at EV batteries as a significant source of power during daytime peaks when the cars are parked and plugged in at work.
In my opinion, This is one of the most overlooked advantages of widespread use of electric cars.
The fact that electric cars are efectively integrating energy consumption is one of their greatest advantages. Unlike computers, lights, and just about all our current electrical appliances which require a specific minimum amount of power at any instant in time, a car's battery can effectively integrate the dips and surges in power from a volatile electrical supply without loss of functionality. This means that locally wind power and solar power is much more useful as an energy source than say, trying to power your home directly from it. At the moment it seems it takes about 4 to 8 hours to charge typical storace devices safely. Considering you may have the car in your garage at home for at least 8 to 14 hours a day, you have some room for slack in how constantly the power has to be supplied to it. If the charging time could be reduced further or something like supercaps or flywheels are used in conjunction with the battery chargers then you can get even better leveling of peaks in power.
Even if there is an overall short fall in wind power in a particular region, there will almost certainly be wind somewhere else - and the grid can transfer this power to where it is needed.
After a quick look at a wind distribution map for the US it seems that there's a fair bit of energy to be had out there, just in wind power alone. Wind turbines are cheap - a lot cheaper than solar. It's the batteries that are needed for storage that costs. Since you will allready have those with electric cars that's not such a problem. Wind won't supply all your energy needs - but it doesnt have to - all it has to do is make a big dent in the average annual amount of electricity you buy. That's the real advantage of electric cars - you get a whole lot of options about where the energy they use comes from. Factor in tidal, solar and geothermal energy sources, and there's a whole lot of energy to be had that's just lying around waiting to be collected.
The sum bay be down, but chances are the wind will be up, or the waves will be pounding. Even if they aren't, there will be a whole lt of cars plugged in somewhere that can help level out the instantaneous emergy demand.
What's really needed is a smarter energy grid, and smallscale distributed production. Think every house with a few square meters / tens of square feet of solar panels and/or wind turbines.
For starters, one major advantage is that you would not need brushes to transfer the power to the stator, so you would be eliminating arcing (which is electrically inefficient), wear and tear, resistance and noise. Another advantage is that once you have your power converted to AC (via an inverter), it's easy to step the voltage up or down to the appropriate level as needed during operation.
Paying a premium for the green power is actually backwards! From TFA, it says that the farmer gets paid the market price for the electricity, plus an "environmental benefit" bonus. This is just plain stupid, and is an artificial negative incentive for people to switch to an environmentally frendlier energy source! What's next? a "sun tax" on solar panels, and "wind tax" on wind turbines? That'll really help with the take up of these energy sources. NOT!
It is the traditional polluting energy producers (ultimately, their customers) that should be paying the environmental benefit fee to the farmers, not the farmer's customers - who are responsibly buying green electricity.
Alternatively, the bonus should be paid by the govornment (hence everyone would be paying a little for it, since everyone benefits from the environmental improvment.)
Were are my mod points when I need them? You hit it right on the head.
I'd happily donate CPU cycles to a cancer research project if I knew that any resulting patents were going to be made available at close to zero licencing cost.
Slashdot Mirror
I suggest staying with tried and true stuff (X10, Levitton)
I would advise against X10 because of some serous limitations in that protocol - its open loop, meaning you can't query the state of lights, no guaranteed delivery of messages to lights/appliances, and a limit of 4 active controllers (i.e. things that can both receive and transmit messages) in a system (any more than that and the signal gets pulled to ground too much, due to the design of the transmitters.)
I wrote an X10 bridge to convert TCP messages to X10 messages via an X10 computer interface kit and it was a real pain dealing with lack of feedback from messages - the best I could do was have the server/bridge remember the last states that had been set, and issue multiple transmissions of a message. The protocol actually specifies that each message is sent twice anyway, but there is no collision detection or retry/back-off etc so it's not that much of a certainty that your messages will get through. Whats worse, is of you have controller devices sending messages to the same device, if controller A tells the device to turn on and then controller B tells it to turn off, controller A will still think it's turned on.
The X10 protocol is also very slow and unresponsive - it takes a second or so for a device to respond to a message, which is not good when you are used to being able to instantly turn a light on or off with a switch.
You might want to look at UPB instead.
well as C++ is a superset of C, I don't see what the problem would be...
Think of all that infra-red radiation flying around from all those remotes too. Infra-red radiation can blind you! and your oven grill uses it to cook your steak so it must be dangerous!
I have My Mum on GNU/Linux (hereby referred to as Linux for brevity) too - she's no rocket scientist - in fact, she can often be found cursing the "stupid computer" for deleting that spreadsheet row or whatever, but as far as doing the things she needs to do, i.e. use a spreadsheet to do her tax, write emails and letters, surf the web, and download/view photos from her digital camera, it works great. Oh - and she thinks gnome's solitaire and other card games are far better than Microsoft's Solitaire.
She's 73, and loves Linux in that it does what she needs it to do, and she hasn't had any of the horror story encounters with computer viruses etc. that her friends have had.
And since she lives 40k away, she also loves it that when she does have a problem (cant find a file, needs to check something on her desktop when she's away from her house, etc.) I can always log in remotely to it and help her out.
Best of all, there hasn't been a major revolution in the way the gnome desktop works every 3 to 5 years - things are still pretty much the same and likely to still be available the same (despite whatever extra candy may get added in alternate desktops) another 5 years. This makes for a hapy mum - not having to relearn how to do everything over and over again. The last thing she needs is a whole new ribbon paradigm, followed by whatever the next big thing is after that. She's not alone - she has friends - and they talk to each other. I think there's a gradually swelling anti-Microsoft gray movement building.
Its when there is a growing user base like this that, that Microsoft should be worried - and probably is.
Windows 3.1 was no where near a full OS. That's why it was installed on top of DOS. It would be more accurate to call it a windows manager.
People wouldn't have to vote on every little thing - just the things they want to vote on. How many bills are put forward every year anyway? I tried to google for the info but it's a bit elusive.
I seem to recall Pierre Proudhon had a lot of ideas along the lines of "property is theft" and also had some rather dodgy philosophies regarding what should be done with people of Jewish origin. I don't know how he proposed land should be managed or who would decide how it should be distributed.
As the first Anarchist, I don't think he was exactly pro-democracy either. I would invite you to live in an anarchist society (Say, Somalia) and see how well anarchy works. I think that the France of Pierre Proudhon's era and modern developed democracies today are quite different too - for one the overall level of education is much higher, and for another, the general population is able to get much more information about the social political and economic condition of the country, and hence are much better informed. You have to remember that Pierre Proudhon was born not long after the chaos of the french revoltion, and France went through a rapid succession of various forms of govornment from republic to dictatorship to empire.
Direct democracy could work in countries that have a good standard of education and good communications networks. It wouldn't work well in countries without these things, but then, regular democracy doesnt seem to work too well there either.
Pure democracy degenerates into rule by rabble and oppression of minorities, unless the subset of voters is relatively small (See Athens).
Do you have a reference, I'd be interested to read about it. (does Athens refer to democracy in ancient Greece?)
if I recall, the US became a republic because it didn't want to be a monarchy?
I certainly don't advocate having a public list of how you voted available for all to read. Your vote should be as anonymous as possible, but just like your fingerprints/skin cells on the ballot papers and potential hidden cameras in voting booths, there will always be a way to find out how you vote if someone wants to know badly enough - especially if that someone is in a govornmental position of authority.
The way to stop that is to have voting records strictly controlled, and also have solid laws about how the voting information can be used. Attempting to buy votes should be seen in the same light as attempting to bribe or blackmail someone, and barring someone from a job based on how they voted would be just as illegal as barring them based on religion, gender, origin or any other personal trait that doesn't directly affect their performance on the job.
You raise some valid concerns, but lets look at them:
. I am sure you feel qualified to vote on a handful of issues that are close to your heart, but what about the other 99.9% of thing going on?
Do you really hold your fellow countrymn in such low regard?
I agree that no-one is likely to have the right answers for all issues, but isn't that already the case with existing legislators? How often have we heard about bills being barely read before they are voted on, or questioned the knowledge of lawmakers on issues we hold dear - like so many technology oriented pieces of legislation (say, for spam laws)? Even the lawmakers aer not infallible, and I don't think that the public would do that much worse on voting on these issues themselves. Sure, there may be some poor decisions made, but they would be OUR poor decisions, not those thrust upon us by a small group who may have been unduly influenced by lobbyists etc. After a year or so of finding out that actually you can't have free schooling AND no tax, I think pople would start taking a lot more interest in the process, and start making more appropriate decisions.
If a politician tosses out a bill and says 'vote for it and you will get more money' while ignoring the costs, do you really think that enough people will vote against it?
I think that this is not as likely as you would think - for the same reason that we don't automatically vote for a politician that promises say, huge tax cuts or free money for everyone - there are enough voters who know that such promises are unfulfillable or unsustainable, so we don't vote that way.
The founding fathers didn't have everything right to start with - after all, they didnt think women were fit to vote at all (along with the rest of the world) , yet in the intervening time we have decided that mabey women can vote sensibly after all. One of the main resons you need so many intervening steps though, is the imposibility of collecting and counting votes by hand - you HAVE to have proxies when you don't have a means of hearing the voice of the people more often. This should no longer be the obstacle it was though, in this age of communications.
At the very least, even if we can't vote on every bill we should be able to directly show our support/non-support for a bill - electronic lobbying for the masses, if you will.
If it can be made to work reliably and securely, electronic voting is by far the best way to go as it offers the possibility of having a much more direct democracy instead of democracy-by-proxy as we have now.
Consider this. You only get one vote every few years, which is then supposed to show your support for every decision your elected representative makes. It would be much better if you could vote on all the major issues, such as major bills, decisions to start wars, etc. With a physical based voting system though, it would be all but impossible to do this as the amount of effort to collect votes is enormous - hence we have political representatives we vote for who act as proxies for our wishes, and hopefully make decisions that the majority of the people would wish for. As we all know, this is often not the case. (eg. Copyright extention)
Now that nearly everyone has a computer (in developed countries) or has easy access to one via internet cafe's, libraries, etc. then imagine what it would be like if you could directly vote (via te internet) on bills such as say, the patriot act or extending copyright, instead of having to depend on some guy to make that vote for you? Apart from anything else, it would take a lot of the current power away from special interest lobby groups (read:big business), as they would have to convince a large slice of the population on how to vote, instead of a small group of senators etc. You would still need a body of lawmakers to put forward bills and propositions, but the general public would have much greater control over the acceptance or rejection of those bills.
The challenge of course would be:
1) ensuring everyone only got one vote, (say, through the use of a hardware keygen or something) and
2) your votes remain anonymous. I don't personally believe this is as valuable as being able to vote on every bill, and would happily sacrifice a little theoretical anonymity for a more direct democracy.
If you get a Mac, you can put your copy of WinXP on it and not worry.
Iot if it's an OEM copy of windows (That I bought with the original hardware when I built the machines) - that will be locked to the mobo of the original system that you installed it on. Right now I have 3 OEM copies of Windows XP (with their respective keys) that are unusable because the original mobos they were on have died and been replaced after some nasty electrical storms. Hence those 3 machines (and another purpose built) are happily running various flavours of Linux. (and I decided I better invest in a decent UPS) I have no plans to ever buy another copy of Windows if I can possibly help it.
So where's the memory slot? I see no mention of how much onboard RAM it has - how do you add memory to this thing?
I'd like to know how having a million "tiny mirrors" is less wasteful than having a million pixels.
The real advantage this camera has is that you no longer need an array of sensors to capture a particular frequency of light. Current CCDs are really an array of pixels x 3, with one array per primary color (red,green,blue). Sure, for a regular visible light camera, a CCD is cheap to make, but with this device, if you wanted to measure some special part of the spectrum or had an unusually sensitive ( but very expensive) ccd you would only need one of them.
As you probably know, most cameras use 3 filters to capture the 3 frequencies of light close to what our eyes see - red green and blue. The part of our eyes that captures red light doesnt just capture one frequency - instead the "red filter" as it were, responds to a range of frequencies from dark red to yellowish. Likewise for green and blue, so actually we miss out on a lot of the information that is actually avaiable when looking at an object.
I imagine that with this camera, oneinteresting application woild be to directly capture full spectrum info for a scene. You could probably do something like focus the light for the single pixel sensor through a prism and create a apectrum, capturing each of the different frequency bands that way - so you would have a camera that is actually acting as a spectrograph for each individual pixel and thus capturing a lot more information than would be possible with a normal tri-filter camera.
In space applications though, cameras often capture qite different frequencies - infra red, uv, etc. With this camera, you could conceivably have an array of rather expensive specialised sensors, with each sensor being very good at capturing a particular wavelength - just as long as your mirror array can relfect all these.
Speed limits have to cater to the lowest common denominator. You might be perfectly safe driving in a 40 mph zone at 60mph in dry conditions, in your new car with traction control, ABS etc, especialy if you have lots of driving experience or extra training, but what about that other guy driving the old crappy 20 year old car with half bald tyres that he got as a retirement present, or worse, that guy who has just had his license a week, driving Dad's SUV in the rain?
A better system would be to have a base limit, (say, 40mph) and an additional max limit that is based on your car and experience AND the road conditions - that would apply to just you. With the additional proviso that if you are involved in any sort of accident over the base limit, or drive dangerously such as tailgating or excessive swerving/dodging, you get hit with a huge extra penalty.
Thus, if you really are a good driver in a good car and the road's empty or otherwise safe to drive at higher speeds, you would be allowed to - with huge penalties for abusing the extra leeway. Plus it would encourage drivers to actually get some advance driving skills and vehicles with decent handling characteristics.
It's obviously replacing non-pritning chars with null then doing something else with that in the translate and filter functions. The replace's are nested because there's no function to simply giv a range of values or array of values in the replace function.
If they had used Postgres or Oracle, you could have used a regular expression to replace all those posky non-printing characters with null.
Take up motorcycle racing, Sky diving, Bungee jumping, hangliding and underwater cave diving. One of those is sure to help you meet your goals if you try hard enough.
Also, bashing vegemite in public is not considered free speech.
Actually they dont even let you enjoy the wholesome goodness of vegemite in the US - thats the best reason to leave. Its illegal to import Vegemite into the US now, and they are searching people at the border for the stuff because it contains folate, which under US food laws is only allowed as an additive in breadstuffs for some reason.
I dont think you know the difference between arbitrage and stock touting. The difference is why the former is legal and the latter illegal.
Arbitrage is where you are buying and selling an instrument (say, shares, currency, a derivative or more "exotic" combination of shares and derivative)in two different markets or two equivalent instruments within the same market, at two different prices. Arbitrage is good for the global markets - it's net effect is to bring the value of the instrument in the two markets (or the equivalent instrument in the same market) into line. It's what keeps the price of say, yen at the same price in Tokyo and New York. Arbitrage investors invest millions to make thousands, at relatively low risk. (unless their name is Nick Leeon - but that's the exception rather than the rule)
Stock touting is damaging to the market because it artificially distorts the value of an instrument with no underlying basis, and reduces investor confidence in the market.
The wear and tear on a road surface is proportional to the fourth power of it's weight(see the section on maintenance) so actually a light fuel efficient vehicle should have to pay a lower price per gallon of fuel, or large vehicles pay a higher price per gallon.
eg. if you have a 1000 kg car compared to a 2000 kg car, then the 2000 kg car is causing 32 times as much wear on the road surface, so the road will need repairs much sooner. a 4000 kg car would be causing 256 times the wear.
As for planetariums and museums, those are valuable in that they inspire kids to take up careers in science.
I can assure you, if there were an orbital habitat/lab with 500 or 1000 or even 50 scientists and astronauts beavering away at stuff in space at any one time, there would be no shortage of kids interested in getting into science with the possibly achievable goal of working in space someday.
As it is though, it's next to impossible for even the best of the best of the best to get more than a single short trip, after decades of training. Who wants to train to be an astronaut these days? I sure dont - and I love sci-fi and space flight and all that. Infact, if someone said I could swap my current career (programmer) for that of an astronaut with a single guaranteed flight in it somewhere, I still would'nt.
The thought of all that trining for only a few hours or days of glory and then an eternity on the ground again horrifies me. It must be hell for returned astronauts, knowing they have reached the pinnacle of their careers.
Yeah, we should do all our testing on animals only. Lots and lots of animals.
Oh wait. Wasn't there a vocal group here not so long ago decrying animal testing?
So how many hours of CPU time do you devote to protein folding and simulation? How much would be needed to be able to simulate these drugs and all their complex interactions with the human body and with each other?
There is no simple solution for drug testing that will please everybody.
We can't test everything on animals because it's cruel and also not a complete model for humans. We can't test everything on people because the early stages (way before this leve of trials) would often kill them. We don't have enough CPU power if we combined every computer on the planet to simulate a single drug in a human fully, so we have to use the best combination. Simulate what we can, then move to animal trials then finally to human trials when it looks safe enough.
At the very least though, we should expect that those that volunteer for drug tests are at least looked after properly when there are effects that will affect them permanently, like maiming, crippling of their immune systems or organs, or death.
If these guys just suffered temporary pain you could say "well they got $4000 so fairs fair" but they are suffering a lot more than that, and deserve a lot more compensation than $4000.
After all, we need people like these guys that will put their skins literally on the line to help develop tomorrow's cures and treatments. I personally am not prepared to volunteer for this stuff. I think it's a bit harsh to those that did volunteer to call them moronic or stupid just because they went into an experiment they were told would have minimal side effects.
the absolute best deal I have been able to find in Australia is $AU 40 a month for 512/128 "unlimited".
Even then you get capped to 64k for the next 24 hours if you are in the top few percent of users (the really big leeches) for more than a couple of days.
There are plans faster than 1500k in only a very few regions here. I wish I could get the UK deal. it sounds sweet. from what I heard (from friends over there) you get TV on demand + your line rental for that 30 quid too. 30 quid is chump change on a London salary.
Furthermore, several groups have looked at EV batteries as a significant source of power during daytime peaks when the cars are parked and plugged in at work.
In my opinion, This is one of the most overlooked advantages of widespread use of electric cars.
The fact that electric cars are efectively integrating energy consumption is one of their greatest advantages. Unlike computers, lights, and just about all our current electrical appliances which require a specific minimum amount of power at any instant in time, a car's battery can effectively integrate the dips and surges in power from a volatile electrical supply without loss of functionality. This means that locally wind power and solar power is much more useful as an energy source than say, trying to power your home directly from it.
At the moment it seems it takes about 4 to 8 hours to charge typical storace devices safely. Considering you may have the car in your garage at home for at least 8 to 14 hours a day, you have some room for slack in how constantly the power has to be supplied to it. If the charging time could be reduced further or something like supercaps or flywheels are used in conjunction with the battery chargers then you can get even better leveling of peaks in power.
Even if there is an overall short fall in wind power in a particular region, there will almost certainly be wind somewhere else - and the grid can transfer this power to where it is needed.
After a quick look at a wind distribution map for the US it seems that there's a fair bit of energy to be had out there, just in wind power alone. Wind turbines are cheap - a lot cheaper than solar. It's the batteries that are needed for storage that costs. Since you will allready have those with electric cars that's not such a problem. Wind won't supply all your energy needs - but it doesnt have to - all it has to do is make a big dent in the average annual amount of electricity you buy. That's the real advantage of electric cars - you get a whole lot of options about where the energy they use comes from. Factor in tidal, solar and geothermal energy sources, and there's a whole lot of energy to be had that's just lying around waiting to be collected.
The sum bay be down, but chances are the wind will be up, or the waves will be pounding. Even if they aren't, there will be a whole lt of cars plugged in somewhere that can help level out the instantaneous emergy demand.
What's really needed is a smarter energy grid, and smallscale distributed production. Think every house with a few square meters / tens of square feet of solar panels and/or wind turbines.
For starters, one major advantage is that you would not need brushes to transfer the power to the stator, so you would be eliminating arcing (which is electrically inefficient), wear and tear, resistance and noise. Another advantage is that once you have your power converted to AC (via an inverter), it's easy to step the voltage up or down to the appropriate level as needed during operation.
Paying a premium for the green power is actually backwards!
From TFA, it says that the farmer gets paid the market price for the electricity, plus an "environmental benefit" bonus. This is just plain stupid, and is an artificial negative incentive for people to switch to an environmentally frendlier energy source! What's next? a "sun tax" on solar panels, and "wind tax" on wind turbines? That'll really help with the take up of these energy sources. NOT!
It is the traditional polluting energy producers (ultimately, their customers) that should be paying the environmental benefit fee to the farmers, not the farmer's customers - who are responsibly buying green electricity.
Alternatively, the bonus should be paid by the govornment (hence everyone would be paying a little for it, since everyone benefits from the environmental improvment.)
Were are my mod points when I need them? You hit it right on the head.
I'd happily donate CPU cycles to a cancer research project if I knew that any resulting patents were going to be made available at close to zero licencing cost.