The sooner optical disks drives go the way of the floppy, the better. The mechano-optical mechanism used in the damn things is just asking to break, and I have had to buy way too many drives over the years because of problems with them. Memory sticks and the internet can distribute anything that you might need to just as easily as a CD or DVD can. Software, music and movies should basically not be getting shipped on the damn things any more, so we can once and for all forget about having to build systems with optical drives without compromising the machine's utility.
I'm still running XP and loving it (just as long as it stays nicely locked away in it's VM running on my Ubuntu box) - so as far as I am concerned, XP IS the last version of windows I have to use.
That's because you had been taught the consequences of antisocial behavior in Ultima 4 and 5 and 6 - After all you you wouldn't want to lose an eigth!
I think that this is what is missing from some modern games - lack of consequences. Sure, it should be possible to rampage and kill civilians - but there should be in-game consequences - say, you get hauled up eventually for war crimes and are not able to complete the game. Likewise, NPC interactions with you should change if you are being particularly brutal - eg. more attacks spawn against you (hellfire missiles from drones for example) , allies have a bigger chance of spurning you, etc.
The problem with games where you can run around and do whatever you want with no consequences is that while you and I can tell it's just a game, I think it does have an influence on how you look at life and consequences for your actions outside of the game. Exhibit A: All the dip-shits that caused the London riots and think it's ok to burn and loot shops for a pair of sneakers etc.
It's called grid tied solar. I have a 3 kw system - cost me $9600 AU ($15000 or so real cost, but there was a federal subsidy here to get it installed). It has wiped my electricity bill out. I used to have a power bill of about $380 per quarter. now I get about $50 to $150 credit per quarter (winter vs summer), on average. I estimate it's making me about somewhere from about 16 to 20% return on my investment, tax free. It will have paid for it's self in 5 or 6 years, based on the price I used to pay for electricity. Of course that's increasing, so it may be sooner. I pay $0.21 / kw for power I use from the grid, and get paid $0.52 / kw for excess power I put back onto the grid - so key for success is to hav a system which is big enough so you have plenty of excess production going back onto the grid during the day. My normal daily power consumption rate is about 550W to 600W (I work from home, when not slacking off and reading slashdot)
Solar's definitely a worthwhile investment. Better return than the money sitting in the bank, and safer than the stock market!
I think that the problem probably lies partly in the diet. The factors you mention would certainly contribute, but lack of good nutrition undobtedly has a large part to play.
Your brain can't work properly when you are feeding it crap food all day, and unfortunately there are so many more junk food options in the US compared to many other parts of the world, with lots of cheap empty calories to fill up on, and way too much sugar.
I think if people ate less of the heavily processed foods and more basic fruit veg and meat/fish etc, they would be a little less neurotic and generally feel better about themselves, less depressed and overall in a better state of mind.
Child porn is a scourge on society, and I strongly support any reasonable means of stomping on the bastards behind it, but we have to stop allowing any new law being justified on the basis of "Think of the children!" and then going on to allow that law to be used for anything beyond it's original intended scope.
The problem I have with this data retention proposal is that it is the digital equivalent of being required to keep a GPS tracker on everyone that records your every movement and keep records of those movements for 18 months, so the authorities can check if you were at the scene of any crimes that may occur.
It would not be acceptable to track people physically in this way with no cause, at least not in my country - so it should not be allowable to track them in the same way online either, without some kind of warrant or reason.
As long as this information is recorded and kept, it lies open to abuse by hackers who gain unauthorised access to the information, and also mis-use by those in authority, who use the information outside of the original scope for which it was intended (ie. to stop child porn)
There is no more waste heat than would otherwise be there from the sun hitting the earth and heating that up, instead of the energy being focused onto a mass of salt.
Does any other sector suffer as many patent lawsuits with supposed patent infringement as the software industry? I mean, I don't hear much about various manufacturer suing each other over mechanical design patents, for example.
Dosn't the fact that there are so many cases like this indicate that the whole idea of software patents is very very broken? It's all but impossible to do a meaningful search for a patent that will help you solve a software problem, that could save you development time. Instead it is much more the ambush model - you go about your business developing something, oblivious to some obscurely written overly broad software patent that your software is supposedly infringing - then get ambushed by the patent holder.
The patent has done absolutely nothing to shorten your development time or lower your costs to bring the product to market. Quite the opposite infact - if you want to write software that does not infringe on any other patent out there, the amount of research for existing software patents that your code might infringe on, would probably take more time than it does to actually write your software, even though you are writing it with no knowledge of the patents in question .
We live in a democracy, and us developers are pretty much totally against software patents, as far as I can see. So why can't we fix this?
I think that's the standard parking technique in places like Nice, France. In flat parking areas, apparently sometimes people leave their handbrakes off so their cars can be nudged back or forward without damaging the fenders.
Unfortunately the 78xx chips regulate by acting as a variable resistor, and burn up the difference between the input voltage and the required output voltage as waste heat, making them very inefficient if the input voltage is significantly higher than the output voltage and also requiring a lot of extra cooling. They are also limited to about 1A output, though you can use power transistors to kick this up into the 5A range.
Maybe this is more news for "turned on nerds". Here's a hint, though. Coca cola and Warcraft are not a mind-altering substances.
That may be the case, but World of Warcraft was much more detrimental to both my work and social life much more than alcohol or any other substance that I have encountered. Fortunately, I have kicked that nasty habit now.
I brought a good deal away from Ultima IV as a kid - it taught me all the virtues I need and especially not to lay waste to entire towns or steal all their food and treasures.
I'm betting more advanced civilizations have invented a "stupid scanner", that computer denies computer access to those insufficiently gifted with enough wit to use a computer without getting suckered by such scams. This also makes it a utopia for tech support staff there - who coincidentally also never have to field calls related to inability to locate power switches, fix "cup holders" or tell users which button is the "any key".
if you are literally burning it (as opposed to using a fuel cell) you are also going to be producing nitrous oxide too, unless your oxygen is from a pure source instead of just using air.
You are making the mistake of equating the speed of aircraft as the main measure of progress in aircraft. Since Concorde, however, the main areas of focus for aircraft development have been in making them safer, easier to maintain, larger and more fuel efficient. For busy routes, larger aircraft reduce the number of flights needed, so reduce the landing fees, maintenance needed, number of flight crews, etc.
Compared to the first commercial passenger jet, the comet, the B747-100 introduced in 1970 used about 55% as much fuel, and the modern B777 only uses 30% as much fuel of the Comet, per passenger mile.
A safety switch will protect you from large currents - they are designed to shut off the supply as soon as there is a difference between active and neutral current, or if there is a leak to ground.
I have been stung by 240v a couple of times too, when I was younger. I haven't had a hit in years, now I treat it with much more respect and caution. Also if your friend is careless enough to get get bitten by 240v and 110v, , it's just as well TV's don't need fly-back circuits any more or he'd be getting bitten by the several thousand volts from those circuits.
I went to a religious school which had no problem teaching the theory of evolution in science class AND teaching the Adam and Eve/Genesis thing in religious classes (of course we spend most of our time in religious classes colouring stuff in and generally mucking around, while we go to do experiments and other fun stuff in science lass). Why cant they just do this in Texas?
Actually QT has an ECMA script engine available, so you can extend any QT program you write with javascript scripts too. (Javascript is bsaically a dialect of ECMA script in case you didn't know)
You need to widen your circle of friends then - or teach them how to start saving. Anyone should be able to reduce their cost of living to that it is 90% of their income, and save the remaining 10%. It's all a question of living within your means, and learning how to save so you don't have to depend on the state or your kids to support you when you retire.
If everyone really is out to get you, is it still called paranoia? I thought you had to have a delusional belief that everyone was after you to be paranoid.
100kwh/day? that's a huge amount of power to be using! Even in Dallas, the city with the highest average, the average residential power usage is 44 kWh/day per customer. Nationally in the US, it's lower, about 30kWh per day.
At that rate of power usage, and with the low cost of subsidized electricity where you live, Solar will not be a viable option for you for quite some time, if ever. $0.12/KWh is about half what it costs here in Australia - and we sell a hell of a lot of coal, so I can only assume that there's some big subsidies there which don't exist here in Aus.
You could definitely look into better insulation, strategically placed shade (either from trees or awnings etc) to reduce direct sun on your house, and possibly renovations that would allow for better natural cooling to cut down that monster bill though.
I have solar installed and it's already making me a 15% return on investment, so I call BS on your calcs. Go redo them.
My panels are guaranteed to still provide 90% capacity or better in 10 years, and 80% capacity or better in 20 years - so yes, over time, they will be running at a fraction of their new capacity - a very large fraction!
Since installation 6 months ago of 3kw of capacity with a 2.8kw inverter, at a cost of $9600, they have already generated 2409 kWh, with a value of between $505 and $1253. If I used all the power, it would have saved me $505, @$0.21/kWh, but if I don't use the power and it's sold onto the grid I get paid $0.52/kWh. In practice, I have actually used about half the power it produces during the day. with the rest getting sold on to the grid, which more than makes enough to cover my night time cost. I used to have an electricity bill of about $400/quarter. On my last bill, I ended up about $120 in credit.
I get paid a higher rate for power I put onto the grid because it of an incentive scheme put in place by both the govt ($0.40 / kwh) and the power company. ($0.12/kwh). It's helping saving the electricity company from having to build additional power stations to meet daytime peak demand.
Seriously, if you have 10k sitting in a bank or poorly performing investment, you should look into what rebates your local,state or federal government provides, find out what the local buy rate is for solar power and check out if it's worth while for your area. It certainly is in mine.
I'm much more worried about grandma driving at 90 in the fast lane... My 80 year old grandma used to drive a Cordia turbo and drove it like she thought it was a Ferrari and that she was the Stig's mum. Luckily they eventually decided she probably shouldn't be driving any more.
No I think the real problem is they want to maintain their monopoly on making up history. If someone else starts doing it too, people might start getting the idea that perhaps all history they read isn't quite as true as they currently think it is.
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The sooner optical disks drives go the way of the floppy, the better. The mechano-optical mechanism used in the damn things is just asking to break, and I have had to buy way too many drives over the years because of problems with them. Memory sticks and the internet can distribute anything that you might need to just as easily as a CD or DVD can. Software, music and movies should basically not be getting shipped on the damn things any more, so we can once and for all forget about having to build systems with optical drives without compromising the machine's utility.
I'm still running XP and loving it (just as long as it stays nicely locked away in it's VM running on my Ubuntu box) - so as far as I am concerned, XP IS the last version of windows I have to use.
That's because you had been taught the consequences of antisocial behavior in Ultima 4 and 5 and 6 - After all you you wouldn't want to lose an eigth!
I think that this is what is missing from some modern games - lack of consequences.
Sure, it should be possible to rampage and kill civilians - but there should be in-game consequences - say, you get hauled up eventually for war crimes and are not able to complete the game. Likewise, NPC interactions with you should change if you are being particularly brutal - eg. more attacks spawn against you (hellfire missiles from drones for example) , allies have a bigger chance of spurning you, etc.
The problem with games where you can run around and do whatever you want with no consequences is that while you and I can tell it's just a game, I think it does have an influence on how you look at life and consequences for your actions outside of the game. Exhibit A: All the dip-shits that caused the London riots and think it's ok to burn and loot shops for a pair of sneakers etc.
It's called grid tied solar. I have a 3 kw system - cost me $9600 AU ($15000 or so real cost, but there was a federal subsidy here to get it installed). It has wiped my electricity bill out. I used to have a power bill of about $380 per quarter. now I get about $50 to $150 credit per quarter (winter vs summer), on average. I estimate it's making me about somewhere from about 16 to 20% return on my investment, tax free. It will have paid for it's self in 5 or 6 years, based on the price I used to pay for electricity. Of course that's increasing, so it may be sooner. I pay $0.21 / kw for power I use from the grid, and get paid $0.52 / kw for excess power I put back onto the grid - so key for success is to hav a system which is big enough so you have plenty of excess production going back onto the grid during the day.
My normal daily power consumption rate is about 550W to 600W (I work from home, when not slacking off and reading slashdot)
Solar's definitely a worthwhile investment. Better return than the money sitting in the bank, and safer than the stock market!
I think that the problem probably lies partly in the diet.
The factors you mention would certainly contribute, but lack of good nutrition undobtedly has a large part to play.
Your brain can't work properly when you are feeding it crap food all day, and unfortunately there are so many more junk food options in the US compared to many other parts of the world, with lots of cheap empty calories to fill up on, and way too much sugar.
I think if people ate less of the heavily processed foods and more basic fruit veg and meat/fish etc, they would be a little less neurotic and generally feel better about themselves, less depressed and overall in a better state of mind.
Here's a video about nutrition and behavior by Dr. Russell Blaylock http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W-gba0GPwU
Child porn is a scourge on society, and I strongly support any reasonable means of stomping on the bastards behind it, but we have to stop allowing any new law being justified on the basis of "Think of the children!" and then going on to allow that law to be used for anything beyond it's original intended scope.
The problem I have with this data retention proposal is that it is the digital equivalent of being required to keep a GPS tracker on everyone that records your every movement and keep records of those movements for 18 months, so the authorities can check if you were at the scene of any crimes that may occur.
It would not be acceptable to track people physically in this way with no cause, at least not in my country - so it should not be allowable to track them in the same way online either, without some kind of warrant or reason.
As long as this information is recorded and kept, it lies open to abuse by hackers who gain unauthorised access to the information, and also mis-use by those in authority, who use the information outside of the original scope for which it was intended (ie. to stop child porn)
There is no more waste heat than would otherwise be there from the sun hitting the earth and heating that up, instead of the energy being focused onto a mass of salt.
Does any other sector suffer as many patent lawsuits with supposed patent infringement as the software industry? I mean, I don't hear much about various
manufacturer suing each other over mechanical design patents, for example.
Dosn't the fact that there are so many cases like this indicate that the whole idea of software patents is very very broken? It's all but impossible to do a meaningful search for a patent that will help you solve a software problem, that could save you development time. Instead it is much more the ambush model - you go about your business developing something, oblivious to some obscurely written overly broad software patent that your software is supposedly infringing - then get ambushed by the patent holder.
The patent has done absolutely nothing to shorten your development time or lower your costs to bring the product to market. Quite the opposite infact - if you want to write software that does not infringe on any other patent out there, the amount of research for existing software patents that your code might infringe on, would probably take more time than it does to actually write your software, even though you are writing it with no knowledge of the patents in question .
We live in a democracy, and us developers are pretty much totally against software patents, as far as I can see. So why can't we fix this?
I think that's the standard parking technique in places like Nice, France. In flat parking areas, apparently sometimes people leave their handbrakes off so their cars can be nudged back or forward without damaging the fenders.
Unfortunately the 78xx chips regulate by acting as a variable resistor, and burn up the difference between the input voltage and the required output voltage as waste heat, making them very inefficient if the input voltage is significantly higher than the output voltage and also requiring a lot of extra cooling. They are also limited to about 1A output, though you can use power transistors to kick this up into the 5A range.
Maybe this is more news for "turned on nerds". Here's a hint, though. Coca cola and Warcraft are not a mind-altering substances.
That may be the case, but World of Warcraft was much more detrimental to both my work and social life much more than alcohol or any other substance that I have encountered.
Fortunately, I have kicked that nasty habit now.
That's what happens when you cross business interests in a fascist state.
I brought a good deal away from Ultima IV as a kid - it taught me all the virtues I need and especially not to lay waste to entire towns or steal all their food and treasures.
I'm betting more advanced civilizations have invented a "stupid scanner", that computer denies computer access to those insufficiently gifted with enough wit to use a computer without getting suckered by such scams. This also makes it a utopia for tech support staff there - who coincidentally also never have to field calls related to inability to locate power switches, fix "cup holders" or tell users which button is the "any key".
if you are literally burning it (as opposed to using a fuel cell) you are also going to be producing nitrous oxide too, unless your oxygen is from a pure source instead of just using air.
You are making the mistake of equating the speed of aircraft as the main measure of progress in aircraft.
Since Concorde, however, the main areas of focus for aircraft development have been in making them safer, easier to maintain, larger and more fuel efficient.
For busy routes, larger aircraft reduce the number of flights needed, so reduce the landing fees, maintenance needed, number of flight crews, etc.
Compared to the first commercial passenger jet, the comet, the B747-100 introduced in 1970 used about 55% as much fuel, and the modern B777 only uses 30% as much fuel of the Comet, per passenger mile.
http://www.transportenvironment.org/Publications/prep_hand_out/lid/398
A safety switch will protect you from large currents - they are designed to shut off the supply as soon as there is a difference between active and neutral current, or if there is a leak to ground.
I have been stung by 240v a couple of times too, when I was younger. I haven't had a hit in years, now I treat it with much more respect and caution. Also if your friend is careless enough to get get bitten by 240v and 110v, , it's just as well TV's don't need fly-back circuits any more or he'd be getting bitten by the several thousand volts from those circuits.
I went to a religious school which had no problem teaching the theory of evolution in science class AND teaching the Adam and Eve/Genesis thing in religious classes (of course we spend most of our time in religious classes colouring stuff in and generally mucking around, while we go to do experiments and other fun stuff in science lass). Why cant they just do this in Texas?
Actually QT has an ECMA script engine available, so you can extend any QT program you write with javascript scripts too. (Javascript is bsaically a dialect of ECMA script in case you didn't know)
You need to widen your circle of friends then - or teach them how to start saving. Anyone should be able to reduce their cost of living to that it is 90% of their income, and save the remaining 10%. It's all a question of living within your means, and learning how to save so you don't have to depend on the state or your kids to support you when you retire.
If everyone really is out to get you, is it still called paranoia? I thought you had to have a delusional belief that everyone was after you to be paranoid.
100kwh/day? that's a huge amount of power to be using! Even in Dallas, the city with the highest average, the average residential power usage is 44 kWh/day per customer. Nationally in the US, it's lower, about 30kWh per day.
At that rate of power usage, and with the low cost of subsidized electricity where you live, Solar will not be a viable option for you for quite some time, if ever. $0.12/KWh is about half what it costs here in Australia - and we sell a hell of a lot of coal, so I can only assume that there's some big subsidies there which don't exist here in Aus.
You could definitely look into better insulation, strategically placed shade (either from trees or awnings etc) to reduce direct sun on your house, and possibly renovations that would allow for better natural cooling to cut down that monster bill though.
I have solar installed and it's already making me a 15% return on investment, so I call BS on your calcs. Go redo them.
My panels are guaranteed to still provide 90% capacity or better in 10 years, and 80% capacity or better in 20 years - so yes, over time, they will be running at a fraction of their new capacity - a very large fraction!
Since installation 6 months ago of 3kw of capacity with a 2.8kw inverter, at a cost of $9600, they have already generated 2409 kWh, with a value of between $505 and $1253. If I used all the power, it would have saved me $505, @$0.21/kWh, but if I don't use the power and it's sold onto the grid I get paid $0.52/kWh. In practice, I have actually used about half the power it produces during the day. with the rest getting sold on to the grid, which more than makes enough to cover my night time cost. I used to have an electricity bill of about $400/quarter. On my last bill, I ended up about $120 in credit.
I get paid a higher rate for power I put onto the grid because it of an incentive scheme put in place by both the govt ($0.40 / kwh) and the power company. ($0.12/kwh). It's helping saving the electricity company from having to build additional power stations to meet daytime peak demand.
Seriously, if you have 10k sitting in a bank or poorly performing investment, you should look into what rebates your local,state or federal government provides, find out what the local buy rate is for solar power and check out if it's worth while for your area. It certainly is in mine.
I'm much more worried about grandma driving at 90 in the fast lane... My 80 year old grandma used to drive a Cordia turbo and drove it like she thought it was a Ferrari and that she was the Stig's mum.
Luckily they eventually decided she probably shouldn't be driving any more.
No I think the real problem is they want to maintain their monopoly on making up history. If someone else starts doing it too, people might start getting the idea that perhaps all history they read isn't quite as true as they currently think it is.