Regardless of priority, it's a fact you indicated you want both shows, and it's a fact Tivo could manage to record both of them if it was a little bit clever.
MythTv *would* manage to get both shows in this situation. (low-pri show with only one airing crashes with high-pri show with several airings)
Sure. Everything has some effect, if it didn't it'd be ineffectual:-)
Jokes aside, it's hard to see what environmental impact wind-turbines should have other than directly on birds and directly on slowing down the air.
The first is pretty-well researched, and newer designs kill a lot less birds (but still some!)
The second is real, but in most areas it's been *more* than compensated by the deforestation. Remove a forest, plant a field of potatoes and you have a lot *less* braking the air. Put up a few wind-turbines and you're still likely to brake the air less than the original forest did.
I wasn't advocating sticking anyones head anywhere.
I was saying China seems to be going in the rigth direction, and has for a number of years. This is a trend we should encourage and support. We want China to *continue* becoming more open, less corrupted, better living-conditions, more freedoms. We acomplish this best (I think!) by;
Cooperating with them.
AND making it clear what kind if improvements we'd most like to see.
Rather than by scaling back the deabte to the point where it's black/white, good/bad, we heroes/China "piece of shit".
I agree we should continue to point out human-rigths abuses and the missing democracy. I just think we can do so more constructively than: You all suck !
what I am saying is that their political system is being held accountable to forces that are NOT in the interest of peoples liberty
Absolutely. As are the political systems of every nation I can think of.
Ok, fine, perhaps not in principle accountable to, but at the very least in *practice* run pretty much according to the will of those forces. Is the Patriot Act "in the interest of peoples liberty" ? How about the DMCA ? How about the Micky-Mouse act? How about the recent suggestion to imprison people who show breasts on homepages without adequate government-approved warnings ? How about the respect being shown for fundamental liberties (such as: no punishment without conviction; no conviction without a fair trial and showing beyond reasonable doubt that the person is guilty) on Guantanamo ?
Yes. China IS worse in just about every of these aspects. But it's still a matter of degree more than a matter of principal differences.
Also please note that I use American examples not because Europe doesn't have enough such examples of our own, we most certainly do. I use American examples because, from experience, most Americans are not familiar with the most horrible human-rigths abuses and cutbacks on liberty in Europe. (possible exception for cameras in the UK, which everyone seems to know about)
My intention ain't to say the USA is particularily bad, certainly you're far far better off than China when it comes to personal liberties. My intention is to point out that it really is a matter of more good, or more bad, and not a matter of one side (us, westerners) being the "good guys" and the other guys (in this case China) being the "bad guys". We've got far far too much rubbish in our own back-yard for that view of reality to carry much weigth. (outside of Bush-speaches and Foxnews coverage)
One thing that irritates me about this whole debate is the implicit assumption that China being Communist is just a technicality and not a big huge mega problem.
But it is. It's just a label, applied to lots of rather different governments really. There's not *that* much that are shared between say 1985 east-germany and present-day China, nevertheless the same label is slapped on both, which doesn't really enligthen anything much.
If anything, it serves to sidetrack the discussion from the real and important problems in China. There are lots of those, and they deserve attention. Attention that you remove if you insist the entire debate should run like this: "China government is Communist. This means they're bad."
Lack of respect for the human rigths is a problem. The few ruling the many without anything resembling a democracy is a problem. Corruption is a problem. All of these problems are, by the way, from an Europen perspective, shared with the USA. (Yes, I'll agree that China is *worse* when it comes to human-rigths violations, however the Amensty international page on USA is also not pleasant reading...)
How do I know that all this talk about giving Chinees the "most freedom that we can" is all bullshit?
I don't know how you "know" that. I strongly suspect it ain't true. It's true without a shadow of a doubt that chinese, particularily those living in the more modern cities have *enormously* much better access to western news and communications today than they did 10 years ago. You're free to consider this real improvement irrelevant and go back to shouting "Communists!" offcourse.
None of them call it like it is, none of them dare say "hey your government is a piece of shit" for fear of offending the Chineese powers that be.
No. Not for that reason. For the reason that realists care about *results*. I generally talk politely to Americans, try to *reasonably* explain what problems I see in their foreign policy. I do this because I consider it more likely to achieve my wanted result than acting like a crazed nutjob and trying to insult as many people as I can. What would be practical *benefits* for say Bush to spend his next meeting with someone chinese saying as many bad words as he can think of ? What would that acomplish ? Would it make the human-rigths situation in China improve ?
Basically, it is a policy of appeasement and to see how it will play out - Chineese history shows very clearly, it will end in disaster.
That's possible. But it's also possible china will continue on the path it's been on for the last decade or two and contine getting more open, continue tolerating more and more free expression, continue basically, in the direction we want them to go.
What's your solution by the way ? Invade tomorrow ?
Bigger more afordable discs doesn't make this problem harder to solve. The solution is dead simple, and always was:
If you care a lot about some data, make sure to have more than one copy of it. The more you care, the more copies you should have, and the more geographically diverse they should be stored.
The difference is, today it's dead simple, and very affordable, for anyone who cares to to store say 100GB of data triple-redundant in 3 different physical locations separated from eachothers by atleast 100 km. A few years ago it was more or less impossible.
Curious, I thought with an efficient enough fuel cell (run off natural gas) you could generate power in your home, avoid the inefficiency of losing power during the power line travel...
Yes. But you'd add the inefficiency of having to transport the natural gas somehow. Which also costs energy. No, natural gas floating in pipes is *not* obviously that much more energy-efficient than electrons floating in wires, it depends on the details. (one thick pipe offers less friction than many small ones, higher voltage power-lines give lower losses)
if I remember my physics, correctly, the power lost during transmission is proportional to i^2 where i is the current.
Yeah. In absolute terms. But offcourse in this case your power transmitted is higher too, so your losses, measured as a percentage, doesn't go up that rapidly.
The oposite is also true though: If you up the voltage, then you can scale back the current needed for a certain power by the same amount, which leads to lower losses. Multiply your voltage by 10, and you can divide current by 10, and still transmit the same power. But at 1/10th the current, this means, by your formula, that the losses are now only 1/100th of what they where.
I thought the process of transforming the energy to and from that state was fairly inefficient (but better then sending it down the power line without doing it. It's been a long time.
Where'd you get that idea ? Large transformers achieve efficiencies in the 99.75% range, and even the small ugly wall-wart transformers that are mass-made at a buck a piece from the cheapest possible materials frequently manage to come in at 95%
It's like the fact that modern day farms are actually far less efficient then ones from 100 years ago, from an energy perspective.
Yes. But only from that perspective, which isn't the one we're trying to optimise for. Our current economical system optimises for production-efficiency. And a single person working on a farm produces probably 100 times more than a single person working on a farm did 100 years ago.
Energy isn't lacking. Not even *clean* energy is lacking, there's plenty of it to go around. The only reason it's not dominant is that currently non-clean energy is cheaper. It's perfectly possible to make clean energy enough to supply current and forseeable needs. But the thing is, with current tech it costs more. I don't know the numbers for US, but for example in Norway wind-power costs double of normal power (which is hydro with us, so also clean, but let's ignore that). In Germany there's a minimum prize given for home-produced energy of $0,50 or so, which is more than enough to make it a paying proposition (i.e. you make a *profit* by installing solar-cells on your roof), but which also happens to be like 4 times the price of conventional power.
A farm using only clean energy would still be a hell of a lot more efficient than the ones 100 years ago. But thing is: it'd be *less* (financially) efficient than the farms that burn oil. So that's what's happening.
But the scale is slowly tipping. The price of oil and gas has raised a lot, and ist likely to raise a lot more. The price of solar, wind, hydro, thermal and so on has all been falling steadily, and will continue to do so.
Religion has always been the solution to questions science couldn't answer (see Greek mythology). Such as it is today, the problem is we have the answers,
Actually, we don't, by far, have all the answers.
But the thing is, we have answers for most everyday easily observable stuff. We know why there is thunder, why it rains, why gunpowder goes "Bang", why children tend to look similar to their parents and so on.
We *don't* know if there realy is a Higgs boson. We don't know how to build an assembler (or atleast we're not capable of doing it). We have no idea if it's really fundamentally hard to factor large numbers, or if we just didn't stumble upon the rigth algorithm yet. We don't know if P = NP.
Thing is, average people don't care about these. They don't even know the *questions* exist, much less what they mean. So how could they possibly care about the answers ?
And then, offcourse, there's the questions for which there exist no "correct" answer. What is the meaning of life ?
To the security of a site, it makes precisely zero difference if the *clientside* is running javascript, asynchronous http-requests, or consists of a guy writing "telnet yourhost 80"
You must remain secure regardless of what the client sends you. You cannot trust the client. This does in no way whatsoever change if "Ajax" or any other buzzword of the day is involved.
The typical spreadsheet I've seen in the companise I work in consists of maybe a few hundred cells with actual data in them, and simple formulas that relate some of that data to other cells, most of which no more complicated than sums and percentages and suchlike.
Adding up 1000 numbers doesn't contrary to what some seem to believe, strain a 286 for very long.
It takes more Ooomph than that to animate clippy. That's where the power goes: visuals, decoration, prettifying.
Yes there's exceptions. There always are. But they are exactly that -- exceptions.
Is that the new definition of "terrorist" ? Soemone who; covertly and securely distribute inflammatory material ?
Weaponmanuals and if you like, training using them is available perfectly openly. I suppose if you partake in such while looking Arabic you get looked at strangely these days. Still, there's nothing even remotely illegal about either.
It is true that secure, anonymous communication is a benefit to those with criminal intentions. But that's a small price to pay for the benefit they provide to the rest of us.
The fact that cellphones, the post, cars, guns, ski-masks, maps and electricity is an enabler for certain kinds of crime, is just an example of the fact that anything can be used for good or evil, the tools are mostly quite neutral, it's the user who decides.
Personally I'm a lot more worried about the freedoms that the government will take away to "protect" us than I am about anything the terrorists are likely to manage.
As you say, while it's not ok to go around looking for a figth, that doesn't mean you have to accept *anything*. It's allowed defending yourself.
Many kids don't really know that they're allowed and indeed encouraged to break "rules" when the situation warrants it. They think the rules apply all the time.
I once had to try to calm down a 13 year old girl that had, on purpose, thrown a chair trough a window to get out in a fire. (the windows of the room she was in, on the ground-floor where locked to stop burglars, and there was so much smoke in the adjacent room that she did not dare go trough there -- a correct decision btw)
She was terrified that her parents would be pissed off at her for breaking the window. Yeah, sure she wasn't thinking clearly because of the panic and extreme stress-level. But it was really amazingly hard to get her to understand that not only would she certainly not be punished for breaking the window, but indeed we all, and certainly her parents would too, thougth she did exactly the rigth thing.
I was just amazed she'd managed, it's not as easy throwing anything trough a window as most people think, especially not when you're 12. I'd be fucking proud/b of my kid if she'd proven that even in an emergency she can think clearly. She even put a blanket over the shards and crabbed out without a scratch for crying out loud.
It's marketing-speak. It means nothing whatsoever. They should get with the program and read the cluetrain manifesto.
innovation, our vision, work closely, end-to-end scenarios, seamless, adress this vision, using services as a distribution vehicle, value-proposition,
Babble. It has no meaning whatsoever. Furthermore it lacks the human voice. Noone speaks like that, when they speak in their own voice. Only/companies/ speak in that voice, and marketing-people talking on the behalf of companies.
Increasingly, language such as this speaks to/noone/. It's just noise. It's not our language. Our language is direct, emotional, brave, human.
It usually takes only a *single* sentence to tell if people are speaking in their own human voice, or if they're just babbling in big-company-lingo. Increasingly people simply tune out the babble.
It migth have been obvious that you needed some sort of sign. But it's a lot less "obvious" that you need a large hand-carved wooden sign. People would find you equally well if you just took a paintbrush and painted "Bobs horseshoes" over the door in 5 minutes.
So, is the added investment worth it ? Does it have a reasonable ROI ? Impossible to tell for sure.
You're probably get more customers entering your shop if the shop looks like the shop of someone who knows what hes doing. A good-looking sign migth contribute to that. Image also tends to change what *type* of customers you get, what expectations they have and to some degree even what they're prepared to pay.
You can guesstimate, but it's going to be horribly rough, and you'll never know for sure if your guess was correct or not. Like they say; 80% of advertising is wasted -- the problem is that noone really knows *which* 80%.
It takes some judgement. The imminent loss of property may be an emergency if the property you're talking of is your house or your car. It ain't an emergency if you're in imminent danger of losing a penny.
A more normal definition is imminent risk of serious harm. There are things that are not loss of life, property or limb, but are nevertheless without a doubt emergencies. If someone is trying to rape you it's damn well an emergency, *even* if it's clear you'll lose neither limb nor life. (yeah, I know, it often isn't)
I agree with you that many people aren't sufficiently aware of the drawbacks of drm to care much one way or the other, aslong as the product "works".
But the thing is; I *don't* agree with you that drm makes "causal piracy" much harder.
You see, DRM only makes casual copying harder if that copying starts with the original, and that's simply extremely rarely the case among the people I know.
Basically, when they get new media/programs/games/music they *either* buy it legally, in most cases on a plastic-disc from a brick-and-mortar store. OR they pirate it casually, by downloading it from say Thepiratebay.org
DRM provides no disintensive to the latter whatsoever. The fact that Joe Blow *migth* (or migth not) have a problem removing the drm himself is almost completely irrelevant. That would be relevant only if he first bougth the original, and THEN spread the cracked version.
Joe Blow doesn't do that. Various 3lit3 cracker-groups with silly-sounding names do that. And they *do* have the interest, the dedication and the technical skills to kill the DRM, if needed by going trough the analog-hole. (hasn't been needed yet though).
Joe Blow cannot himself crack CSS. This does however *not* mean that it's a problem for Joe Blow to download the latest disney-movie from somewhere.
First: I take issue with the idea that Catholic, or other religious people are in any way shape or form more moral than other people. I see no evidence of this whatsoever.
Secondly: that's exactly my point: Most people aren't either-or, they're more likely to buy legally if thats convenient, cheap, available, practical, good. And more likely to pirate if *that* is convenient, easy, good, practical.
So, by making the genuine product suck more, you *may* prevent Joe Blow from making a copy of it himself, assuming he already owns the original. But if he *didn't* already buy your product, then the effect is oposite: The existence of DRM on the genuine article is an argument in favor of getting the pirated version.
DRM on original discs affects only people who *HAVE* original discs. This is pretty obvious.
Thus my point stands: DRM amounts to punishing those who buy genuine goods, and rewarind those who don't.
Those who do both will learn that Original=sucks, and pirated=good and be more likely to go for the pirated version in the future. (by sucks I mean all those problems that I mentioned in the grandparent)
First, the human body is indeed effective, but not anywhere *close* to what you claim. The thing is, when you calculate the calorie-need for a certain activity, you typically do so by looking at a table. Say swim a mile in half an hour requires about X calories.
But those numbers are *already* calculated (or more likely measured) including the human inefficiencies.
Ever noticed you get warm and start sweating if you do heavy work ? That's waste heat for you baby.
If you pedal a bike, and generate 100W, you'll use significantly more than 25cal/s doing so (a calorie is about 4 Joule).
Second, producing "450 horsepower pro second" is a completely nonsensical statement. Horsepower (or KW) are measures of *power*, A car migth have 100 horsepower, you can measure it over a second, an hour or a year, it'll still have 100 horsepower.
It's a lot like saying you're 6 feet tall pro second, which makes no sense, unless perhaps you mean you *grow* at 6 feet pro second.
The article is dumb. 100 times as strong as skeletal muscle is a statement with no meaning unless you specify what exactly you mean;
Is it 100 times as strong as a muscle of the same mass ?
Is it 100 times as strong as a muschle of the same volume ?
Do you mean it has 100 times the force ?
Or 100 times the movement ?
Or 100 times the power ? (i.e. force times movement)
First: no. A blind person has significant problems doing all of those things.
I don't think that's a very good excuse though: "sure we suck, but the other guys do too."
Fact is, a blind person can still both hear and read. Linux has some base advantage here, because everything can be acomplished from a command-line, and face it, if you're blind it's a lot easier to do "cp a b" than it is to point at the tiny picture and drag it to the othe tiny picture, then let go.
It's usually not that hard to make a program more accessible. It's not an all or nothing thing. A little improvement is still a little improvement.
I agree with you that being able to *use* a system is more important than being able to install and configure a system, but that doesn't mean both aren't desireable.
Maybe. But the fact remains: DRM causes lots of unpleasantness for the honest buyers, while having no effect whatsoever on the people who download from thepiratebay.
Problem: digital copies are equally "good" as the original.
Industry solution(drm): Make it so that today a copy is actually *superior* to the original.
What is superior ?
An original, say Bertine Zetlits-CD, that is not valid CD-audio, won't play in your car, won't play in your DVD-player, won't play in your computer, won't transfer cleanly to your ipod, won't transfer clearly to your squeezebox and can't easily be backed up.
OR
The pirated copy of the street in Warsawa (or bittorent) that has *NONE* of these problems.
OK, so the original tends to have prettier box-graphics, but that's about it.
I wasn't talking of the hypotetical future, but of *now*. I agree with you that next-generation optical storage may provide value at some point in the future, just that they likely won't with the prices and capacities quoted here.
I said "going" (as in currently) from cdrom to DVD gives like 10 times the storage. This is *currently* true, there are *still* machines sold with combo-drives that can only burn CDs, but that can read DVDs. Changing one of these for a current DVD-burner lets you burn like 9GB instead of like 800MB, which is roughly 10 times the capacity. The price for this upgrade is low too -- thus a good value-proposition, and indeed *most* people buy machines with DVD-burners.
If you buy blue-ray at launch, you'll be able to burn discs roughly twice as large as current DVDs. Those discs will however, if this story is to be believed, cost 50 times as much, and the drives will also cost a LOT more than DVD-burners.
For 99% of computer-users that is useless; they'll be better of burning 2 DVDs instead..
It doesn't matter if the reason for only 25GB is the drives or the discs -- the fact remains: if you buy it at launch, you can burn 25GB.
Yes, at some later date you will probably be able to burn 50GB discs, and get the discs for a lot cheaper.
But the thing is: if *that* is the value-proposition, then the only thing that makes sense is to buy the drive at that "later date".
It *never* makes sense to buy computer-equipment *NOW* for the reason that it may provide value *LATER*. Prices, especially on new tech, fall so quickly that that is near insane. Buying now is only a good idea if the device provides value for money now. Which this doesn't.
You seem to agree with this, so basically we're talking past eachothers. I never said blueray will never provide value. Just that on these terms (the ones quoted in the article) it's horrible value.
*how* IE choose to load its plugins is irrelevant. When he talked about ActiveX on the internet he meant content on the actual internet that is ActiveX, that is -- that requires an ActiveX-understanding broweser to view.
Such content is indeed very rare, and does NOT include either flash or java.
If Firefox starts loading plugins by the use of Python tomorrow, this doesn't mean that Flash is now python-only content. And the fact that IE uses ActiveX to load the flash-plugin does not mean that a flash-movie on the internet is ActiveX-content.
You fail to understand the magnitude of these impacts. Hint: rifle-bullets do not impact at 24 miles/second, they leave the muzzle with something between 0.2 and 1 miles/second (old pistol to kinetic-kill armour-piercing), the impact-speed is even lower due to air-resistance. (depends on distance though)
24 miles/second is roughly 50 times that speed, so the impact-energy would be roughly 2500 times higher.
So, it's sorta like saying that humans are hardy creatures, they can easily survive a fall of 1 foot, so falling 2500 feet and landing safely should be no problem.
As astronomical distances and velocities go, bullets are really amazingly fucking slow.
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Regardless of priority, it's a fact you indicated you want both shows, and it's a fact Tivo could manage to record both of them if it was a little bit clever.
MythTv *would* manage to get both shows in this situation. (low-pri show with only one airing crashes with high-pri show with several airings)
Jokes aside, it's hard to see what environmental impact wind-turbines should have other than directly on birds and directly on slowing down the air.
The first is pretty-well researched, and newer designs kill a lot less birds (but still some!)
The second is real, but in most areas it's been *more* than compensated by the deforestation. Remove a forest, plant a field of potatoes and you have a lot *less* braking the air. Put up a few wind-turbines and you're still likely to brake the air less than the original forest did.
I was saying China seems to be going in the rigth direction, and has for a number of years. This is a trend we should encourage and support. We want China to *continue* becoming more open, less corrupted, better living-conditions, more freedoms. We acomplish this best (I think!) by;
Cooperating with them.
AND making it clear what kind if improvements we'd most like to see.
Rather than by scaling back the deabte to the point where it's black/white, good/bad, we heroes/China "piece of shit".
I agree we should continue to point out human-rigths abuses and the missing democracy. I just think we can do so more constructively than: You all suck !
Absolutely. As are the political systems of every nation I can think of.
Ok, fine, perhaps not in principle accountable to, but at the very least in *practice* run pretty much according to the will of those forces. Is the Patriot Act "in the interest of peoples liberty" ? How about the DMCA ? How about the Micky-Mouse act? How about the recent suggestion to imprison people who show breasts on homepages without adequate government-approved warnings ? How about the respect being shown for fundamental liberties (such as: no punishment without conviction; no conviction without a fair trial and showing beyond reasonable doubt that the person is guilty) on Guantanamo ?
Yes. China IS worse in just about every of these aspects. But it's still a matter of degree more than a matter of principal differences.
Also please note that I use American examples not because Europe doesn't have enough such examples of our own, we most certainly do. I use American examples because, from experience, most Americans are not familiar with the most horrible human-rigths abuses and cutbacks on liberty in Europe. (possible exception for cameras in the UK, which everyone seems to know about)
My intention ain't to say the USA is particularily bad, certainly you're far far better off than China when it comes to personal liberties. My intention is to point out that it really is a matter of more good, or more bad, and not a matter of one side (us, westerners) being the "good guys" and the other guys (in this case China) being the "bad guys". We've got far far too much rubbish in our own back-yard for that view of reality to carry much weigth. (outside of Bush-speaches and Foxnews coverage)
But it is. It's just a label, applied to lots of rather different governments really. There's not *that* much that are shared between say 1985 east-germany and present-day China, nevertheless the same label is slapped on both, which doesn't really enligthen anything much.
If anything, it serves to sidetrack the discussion from the real and important problems in China. There are lots of those, and they deserve attention. Attention that you remove if you insist the entire debate should run like this: "China government is Communist. This means they're bad."
Lack of respect for the human rigths is a problem. The few ruling the many without anything resembling a democracy is a problem. Corruption is a problem. All of these problems are, by the way, from an Europen perspective, shared with the USA. (Yes, I'll agree that China is *worse* when it comes to human-rigths violations, however the Amensty international page on USA is also not pleasant reading...)
How do I know that all this talk about giving Chinees the "most freedom that we can" is all bullshit?
I don't know how you "know" that. I strongly suspect it ain't true. It's true without a shadow of a doubt that chinese, particularily those living in the more modern cities have *enormously* much better access to western news and communications today than they did 10 years ago. You're free to consider this real improvement irrelevant and go back to shouting "Communists!" offcourse.
None of them call it like it is, none of them dare say "hey your government is a piece of shit" for fear of offending the Chineese powers that be.
No. Not for that reason. For the reason that realists care about *results*. I generally talk politely to Americans, try to *reasonably* explain what problems I see in their foreign policy. I do this because I consider it more likely to achieve my wanted result than acting like a crazed nutjob and trying to insult as many people as I can. What would be practical *benefits* for say Bush to spend his next meeting with someone chinese saying as many bad words as he can think of ? What would that acomplish ? Would it make the human-rigths situation in China improve ?
Basically, it is a policy of appeasement and to see how it will play out - Chineese history shows very clearly, it will end in disaster.
That's possible. But it's also possible china will continue on the path it's been on for the last decade or two and contine getting more open, continue tolerating more and more free expression, continue basically, in the direction we want them to go.
What's your solution by the way ? Invade tomorrow ?
If you care a lot about some data, make sure to have more than one copy of it. The more you care, the more copies you should have, and the more geographically diverse they should be stored.
The difference is, today it's dead simple, and very affordable, for anyone who cares to to store say 100GB of data triple-redundant in 3 different physical locations separated from eachothers by atleast 100 km. A few years ago it was more or less impossible.
Yes. But you'd add the inefficiency of having to transport the natural gas somehow. Which also costs energy. No, natural gas floating in pipes is *not* obviously that much more energy-efficient than electrons floating in wires, it depends on the details. (one thick pipe offers less friction than many small ones, higher voltage power-lines give lower losses)
if I remember my physics, correctly, the power lost during transmission is proportional to i^2 where i is the current.
Yeah. In absolute terms. But offcourse in this case your power transmitted is higher too, so your losses, measured as a percentage, doesn't go up that rapidly.
The oposite is also true though: If you up the voltage, then you can scale back the current needed for a certain power by the same amount, which leads to lower losses. Multiply your voltage by 10, and you can divide current by 10, and still transmit the same power. But at 1/10th the current, this means, by your formula, that the losses are now only 1/100th of what they where.
I thought the process of transforming the energy to and from that state was fairly inefficient (but better then sending it down the power line without doing it. It's been a long time.
Where'd you get that idea ? Large transformers achieve efficiencies in the 99.75% range, and even the small ugly wall-wart transformers that are mass-made at a buck a piece from the cheapest possible materials frequently manage to come in at 95%
It's like the fact that modern day farms are actually far less efficient then ones from 100 years ago, from an energy perspective.
Yes. But only from that perspective, which isn't the one we're trying to optimise for. Our current economical system optimises for production-efficiency. And a single person working on a farm produces probably 100 times more than a single person working on a farm did 100 years ago.
Energy isn't lacking. Not even *clean* energy is lacking, there's plenty of it to go around. The only reason it's not dominant is that currently non-clean energy is cheaper. It's perfectly possible to make clean energy enough to supply current and forseeable needs. But the thing is, with current tech it costs more. I don't know the numbers for US, but for example in Norway wind-power costs double of normal power (which is hydro with us, so also clean, but let's ignore that). In Germany there's a minimum prize given for home-produced energy of $0,50 or so, which is more than enough to make it a paying proposition (i.e. you make a *profit* by installing solar-cells on your roof), but which also happens to be like 4 times the price of conventional power.
A farm using only clean energy would still be a hell of a lot more efficient than the ones 100 years ago. But thing is: it'd be *less* (financially) efficient than the farms that burn oil. So that's what's happening.
But the scale is slowly tipping. The price of oil and gas has raised a lot, and ist likely to raise a lot more. The price of solar, wind, hydro, thermal and so on has all been falling steadily, and will continue to do so.
Actually, we don't, by far, have all the answers.
But the thing is, we have answers for most everyday easily observable stuff. We know why there is thunder, why it rains, why gunpowder goes "Bang", why children tend to look similar to their parents and so on.
We *don't* know if there realy is a Higgs boson. We don't know how to build an assembler (or atleast we're not capable of doing it). We have no idea if it's really fundamentally hard to factor large numbers, or if we just didn't stumble upon the rigth algorithm yet. We don't know if P = NP.
Thing is, average people don't care about these. They don't even know the *questions* exist, much less what they mean. So how could they possibly care about the answers ?
And then, offcourse, there's the questions for which there exist no "correct" answer. What is the meaning of life ?
To the security of a site, it makes precisely zero difference if the *clientside* is running javascript, asynchronous http-requests, or consists of a guy writing "telnet yourhost 80"
You must remain secure regardless of what the client sends you. You cannot trust the client. This does in no way whatsoever change if "Ajax" or any other buzzword of the day is involved.
The typical spreadsheet I've seen in the companise I work in consists of maybe a few hundred cells with actual data in them, and simple formulas that relate some of that data to other cells, most of which no more complicated than sums and percentages and suchlike.
Adding up 1000 numbers doesn't contrary to what some seem to believe, strain a 286 for very long.
It takes more Ooomph than that to animate clippy. That's where the power goes: visuals, decoration, prettifying.
Yes there's exceptions. There always are. But they are exactly that -- exceptions.
Weaponmanuals and if you like, training using them is available perfectly openly. I suppose if you partake in such while looking Arabic you get looked at strangely these days. Still, there's nothing even remotely illegal about either.
It is true that secure, anonymous communication is a benefit to those with criminal intentions. But that's a small price to pay for the benefit they provide to the rest of us.
The fact that cellphones, the post, cars, guns, ski-masks, maps and electricity is an enabler for certain kinds of crime, is just an example of the fact that anything can be used for good or evil, the tools are mostly quite neutral, it's the user who decides.
Personally I'm a lot more worried about the freedoms that the government will take away to "protect" us than I am about anything the terrorists are likely to manage.
As you say, while it's not ok to go around looking for a figth, that doesn't mean you have to accept *anything*. It's allowed defending yourself.
Many kids don't really know that they're allowed and indeed encouraged to break "rules" when the situation warrants it. They think the rules apply all the time.
I once had to try to calm down a 13 year old girl that had, on purpose, thrown a chair trough a window to get out in a fire. (the windows of the room she was in, on the ground-floor where locked to stop burglars, and there was so much smoke in the adjacent room that she did not dare go trough there -- a correct decision btw)
She was terrified that her parents would be pissed off at her for breaking the window. Yeah, sure she wasn't thinking clearly because of the panic and extreme stress-level. But it was really amazingly hard to get her to understand that not only would she certainly not be punished for breaking the window, but indeed we all, and certainly her parents would too, thougth she did exactly the rigth thing.
I was just amazed she'd managed, it's not as easy throwing anything trough a window as most people think, especially not when you're 12. I'd be fucking proud/b of my kid if she'd proven that even in an emergency she can think clearly. She even put a blanket over the shards and crabbed out without a scratch for crying out loud.
innovation, our vision, work closely, end-to-end scenarios, seamless, adress this vision, using services as a distribution vehicle, value-proposition,
Babble. It has no meaning whatsoever. Furthermore it lacks the human voice. Noone speaks like that, when they speak in their own voice. Only /companies/ speak in that voice, and marketing-people talking on the behalf of companies.
Increasingly, language such as this speaks to /noone/. It's just noise. It's not our language. Our language is direct, emotional, brave, human.
It usually takes only a *single* sentence to tell if people are speaking in their own human voice, or if they're just babbling in big-company-lingo. Increasingly people simply tune out the babble.
So, is the added investment worth it ? Does it have a reasonable ROI ? Impossible to tell for sure.
You're probably get more customers entering your shop if the shop looks like the shop of someone who knows what hes doing. A good-looking sign migth contribute to that. Image also tends to change what *type* of customers you get, what expectations they have and to some degree even what they're prepared to pay.
You can guesstimate, but it's going to be horribly rough, and you'll never know for sure if your guess was correct or not. Like they say; 80% of advertising is wasted -- the problem is that noone really knows *which* 80%.
Circular definition. Anything is property that we agree to call property. This doesn't define it.
A more normal definition is imminent risk of serious harm. There are things that are not loss of life, property or limb, but are nevertheless without a doubt emergencies. If someone is trying to rape you it's damn well an emergency, *even* if it's clear you'll lose neither limb nor life. (yeah, I know, it often isn't)
A large portion of the people who die in fires die sleeping in their beds, never waking at all.
Get a smoke-alarm. It's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot of an improvement.
But the thing is; I *don't* agree with you that drm makes "causal piracy" much harder.
You see, DRM only makes casual copying harder if that copying starts with the original, and that's simply extremely rarely the case among the people I know.
Basically, when they get new media/programs/games/music they *either* buy it legally, in most cases on a plastic-disc from a brick-and-mortar store. OR they pirate it casually, by downloading it from say Thepiratebay.org
DRM provides no disintensive to the latter whatsoever. The fact that Joe Blow *migth* (or migth not) have a problem removing the drm himself is almost completely irrelevant. That would be relevant only if he first bougth the original, and THEN spread the cracked version.
Joe Blow doesn't do that. Various 3lit3 cracker-groups with silly-sounding names do that. And they *do* have the interest, the dedication and the technical skills to kill the DRM, if needed by going trough the analog-hole. (hasn't been needed yet though).
Joe Blow cannot himself crack CSS. This does however *not* mean that it's a problem for Joe Blow to download the latest disney-movie from somewhere.
Secondly: that's exactly my point: Most people aren't either-or, they're more likely to buy legally if thats convenient, cheap, available, practical, good. And more likely to pirate if *that* is convenient, easy, good, practical.
So, by making the genuine product suck more, you *may* prevent Joe Blow from making a copy of it himself, assuming he already owns the original. But if he *didn't* already buy your product, then the effect is oposite: The existence of DRM on the genuine article is an argument in favor of getting the pirated version.
DRM on original discs affects only people who *HAVE* original discs. This is pretty obvious.
Thus my point stands: DRM amounts to punishing those who buy genuine goods, and rewarind those who don't.
Those who do both will learn that Original=sucks, and pirated=good and be more likely to go for the pirated version in the future. (by sucks I mean all those problems that I mentioned in the grandparent)
First, the human body is indeed effective, but not anywhere *close* to what you claim. The thing is, when you calculate the calorie-need for a certain activity, you typically do so by looking at a table. Say swim a mile in half an hour requires about X calories.
But those numbers are *already* calculated (or more likely measured) including the human inefficiencies.
Ever noticed you get warm and start sweating if you do heavy work ? That's waste heat for you baby.
If you pedal a bike, and generate 100W, you'll use significantly more than 25cal/s doing so (a calorie is about 4 Joule).
Second, producing "450 horsepower pro second" is a completely nonsensical statement. Horsepower (or KW) are measures of *power*, A car migth have 100 horsepower, you can measure it over a second, an hour or a year, it'll still have 100 horsepower.
It's a lot like saying you're 6 feet tall pro second, which makes no sense, unless perhaps you mean you *grow* at 6 feet pro second.
The article is dumb. 100 times as strong as skeletal muscle is a statement with no meaning unless you specify what exactly you mean;
I don't think that's a very good excuse though: "sure we suck, but the other guys do too."
Fact is, a blind person can still both hear and read. Linux has some base advantage here, because everything can be acomplished from a command-line, and face it, if you're blind it's a lot easier to do "cp a b" than it is to point at the tiny picture and drag it to the othe tiny picture, then let go.
It's usually not that hard to make a program more accessible. It's not an all or nothing thing. A little improvement is still a little improvement.
I agree with you that being able to *use* a system is more important than being able to install and configure a system, but that doesn't mean both aren't desireable.
Problem: digital copies are equally "good" as the original.
Industry solution(drm): Make it so that today a copy is actually *superior* to the original.
What is superior ?
An original, say Bertine Zetlits-CD, that is not valid CD-audio, won't play in your car, won't play in your DVD-player, won't play in your computer, won't transfer cleanly to your ipod, won't transfer clearly to your squeezebox and can't easily be backed up.
OR
The pirated copy of the street in Warsawa (or bittorent) that has *NONE* of these problems.
OK, so the original tends to have prettier box-graphics, but that's about it.
I said "going" (as in currently) from cdrom to DVD gives like 10 times the storage. This is *currently* true, there are *still* machines sold with combo-drives that can only burn CDs, but that can read DVDs. Changing one of these for a current DVD-burner lets you burn like 9GB instead of like 800MB, which is roughly 10 times the capacity. The price for this upgrade is low too -- thus a good value-proposition, and indeed *most* people buy machines with DVD-burners.
If you buy blue-ray at launch, you'll be able to burn discs roughly twice as large as current DVDs. Those discs will however, if this story is to be believed, cost 50 times as much, and the drives will also cost a LOT more than DVD-burners.
For 99% of computer-users that is useless; they'll be better of burning 2 DVDs instead..
It doesn't matter if the reason for only 25GB is the drives or the discs -- the fact remains: if you buy it at launch, you can burn 25GB.
Yes, at some later date you will probably be able to burn 50GB discs, and get the discs for a lot cheaper. But the thing is: if *that* is the value-proposition, then the only thing that makes sense is to buy the drive at that "later date".
It *never* makes sense to buy computer-equipment *NOW* for the reason that it may provide value *LATER*. Prices, especially on new tech, fall so quickly that that is near insane. Buying now is only a good idea if the device provides value for money now. Which this doesn't.
You seem to agree with this, so basically we're talking past eachothers. I never said blueray will never provide value. Just that on these terms (the ones quoted in the article) it's horrible value.
Such content is indeed very rare, and does NOT include either flash or java.
If Firefox starts loading plugins by the use of Python tomorrow, this doesn't mean that Flash is now python-only content. And the fact that IE uses ActiveX to load the flash-plugin does not mean that a flash-movie on the internet is ActiveX-content.
24 miles/second is roughly 50 times that speed, so the impact-energy would be roughly 2500 times higher.
So, it's sorta like saying that humans are hardy creatures, they can easily survive a fall of 1 foot, so falling 2500 feet and landing safely should be no problem.
As astronomical distances and velocities go, bullets are really amazingly fucking slow.