For a better analogy, it's more like getting your fluids checked regularly: everyone born in the modern age *should* know to do this, but somehow some people manage to miss this lesson.
Actually, even that's not nearly as important as it used to be -- 20 years ago I used to check my oil and coolant nearly every week and sometimes the car actually needed one or the other.
I've had my current car for nearly 10 years and it has never needed oil, water or any other fluid (besides wiper fluid) to be topped up between oil changes. Now I'm lucky if I check my fluids once a month - often I don't check anything at all between oil changes. Maybe someday I'll get bitten by an oil or coolant leak that goes unnoticed until the oil pressure or temperature warning lights come on, but I'm willing to take that risk, which seems minimal. I'll notice a slow leak on my garage floor and a fast leak might drain the car between my weekly or monthly checks anyway.
I had one guy at IND tell me that what the machines put out is not radiation - it's the same stuff as what my cell phone puts out. I told him I worked on nuclear power plants for 6 years and I know what radiation is. The way he told me, I wondered what kind of propaganda the makers of those machines is feeding to the TSA agents.
He wasn't far from the truth, as far as I know, IND has the millimeter wave RF scanners:
These operate in the EHF frequency band (30-300Ghz), or around 20 - 200 times higher in frequency than your phone, but still considered non-ionizing RF radiation. Granted, any RF field is still "radiation", but it's much different than the ionizing radiation of x-ray scanners.
If you're not afraid to use your cell phone, then you probably shouldn't be afraid of these machines (at least not because of "radiation").
I'm not so sure of that. I've read a lot of the complaints that purport to come from researchers "in the field", and while they are in fact from researchers and even from researchers in related fields, they usually aren't really from researchers in the field. More to the point, though (since oncologists are reasonably allowed to have opinions about radiation devices), they seem to be written by researchers who either are ignorant of the facts or intentionally ignore the facts
Then how about 4 UCSF professors are are: an imaging expert and professor of biochemistry and biophysics, a world renown cancer expert, and x-ray crytrallographers and imaging experts? Surely one of those guys knows a thing or two about x-ray imaging and have a valid reason for concern?
1. The safety of the machines hasn't been proven, they haven't been out long enough to compile long term statistics on their safety to the public and to the people running the scanners. Xrays are ionizing radiation, and even if they don't penetrate the skin I can't imagine that messing around with skin cell DNA molecules is healthy for anyone and there are some real questions about the effects of the machines. What safeguards are in the machine to monitor X-ray levels and prevent overdosing? Everyone here knows that even if there are safeguards in place, they are notfoolproof.
2. The security of the scanners is quite another unknown - who will be viewing the images? What precautions are taking to protect the privacy of the virtually naked pictures of an unsuspecting public?
And the biggest "if": Have the machines proven to be effective? Some researchers have already found trivial ways to bypass the scanners (hiding contraband in a body cavity is the obvious hole (no pun intended), but they also found that you can tape high explosives to your body to conceal it. And a typical bus station or stadium has more security holes than an airport (which have already been shown to have a porous perimeter despite the security screenings), so why should we think that scanning the public will enhance security at all?
I don't see the point of this phone -- why run apps from the phone at all when it's in the dock? Put a powerful processor in the dock and run the apps on the (presumably much faster) dock processor when the phone is docked -- mount the filesystem from the phone so all of your files are available.
Running apps (except firefox) from the phone itself seems like a gimmick that doesn't really accomplish anything useful.
It's unfortunate for us but there'll always be a demand for locked phones. Services like Netflix will never officially appear on a device which is completely open to modification.
And there's the whole corporate market -- many corporations have a legal mendate (or just corporate policy) to keep email secure and the only devices they can allow to connect to their mail servers on ones that they can enforce a password lock policy that allows remote wipe and auto-wipe after a number of unlock fails.
A rooted phone can allow the user to violate these policies.
Dependency on countries and regimes openly declaring the US as an enemy..everytime you fuel your car..you are funding terrorism. Thats the BIG PRICE
Wouldn't it be better to just not get in your car than to support environmentally hazardous fuel extraction? Are people really supposed to feel better about themselves knowing that our fossil fuel dependency is "only" causing earthquakes in Arkansas, and "only" contaminating water in Pennsyvania and "only" leaving millions of barrels of oil at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico?
Granted, there's no way to eliminate all oil use in our lifetimes, but there's a *lot* that can be done to reduce transportation fuel use by moving to more fuel efficient cars.
You may say that you have no choice but to use your car, but you do have a choice, you could live in a city or large suburb with effective public transportation, and good bikability and walkability. You just chose to make a car an integral part of your lifestyle - many people in big cities live without any car.
Pretty much every idiot that is buying a computer at Best Buy - while most people know that they *should* be backing up their data, few do. Of all of the non-techy computer users I know, only one is backing up her data, and that's because her operating system came bundled with software that makes it trivally easy: Time Machine. Does Win7 come with any easy to use backup software?
Windows seems to go out of its way to make it difficult to backup software and application data needed to recover in the event of a drive failure. Since some applications choose to store data in their own application data folder, even if a user backs up MyDocuments regularly, they can still lose data in the event of a hard drive crash.
I've been using Windows for years, but still have no idea how to back up an application such that I can restore it and all of my settings on a new hard drive (without doing a full-disk backup)
But just as bad (or worse) are those that say "I don't need backups, I have RAID!". Those are the people that know the importance of backups, but choose to ignore them because they think RAID protects them.
The idea that everyone should personally handle backing up their email is insanity. If you're a professional at this stuff, then fine, do it at home as well. But for nearly everyone in the population, gmail is going to be vastly more reliable than any backup scheme they come up with at home.
Backing up your hosted email doesn't mean having to run your own SMTP daemon... I don't see how making a backup of cloud hosted data could be construed as bad advice. It's not hard to use an IMAP client that stores a copy of messages locally, and no matter how bad the user's backups are, Gmail + some local backup is better than Gmail + no local backup.
This isn't the first time Google has lost email and it won't be the last.
Oh, that explains it, it's very versatile in a number of features and supports various enterprise and Web scenarios.
Others here on Slashdot are very familiar (perhaps too familiar) and still aren't sure what features of Sharepoint lend themselves to this sort of eBook lending system, and what exactly a "sharepoint like" portal is. Is it similar to a Drupal like portal? Or a Wiki like portal?
My solar power system should pay itself back in 10 - 12 years, though admittedly that does take government sponsored incentives into account.
Then it's not really paying itself back, is it? All it's doing is stealing from your neighbors in order to get a free ride.
Well, another way to look at it is that I put up my own money to help the government subsidize the burgeoning solar power industry.
I bought my system several years ago when panels were not quite as cost effective - had I bought today, the *unsubsidized* payback period would have been around 12 - 14 years (subsidized would be around 7 years). So my money helped to drive the development and production of today's more efficient panels, so I think the government got some value in my subsidy.
Alternative energy tax credits cost the country around $1B/year - contrast with Ethanol subsidies that cost around $7B/year and do nothing to help with energy independance (depending who you talk to, Ethanol is either a small net-positive in energy gain or a net negative)
Yes, subsidizing a technology to foster innovation can be a good idea but that should be long gone for solar energy. I mean, it's been subsidized for what, 30 years now? Lets face it, the technology hasn't been anywhere close to being mainstream for a long time and it still isn't there. Right solar cells still create more harm to the environment when they are manufactured than they save over their whole life.
Give the scientists more time to research solar. In the meantime drop the subsidies and go with what's tried and true: nuclear
I agree that Nuclear is a much better than coal and other non-renewable fuels, but Solar (and Wind in some areas) still shows promise. For $35K (the price many people pay for a car), I could generate 100% of my power for the next 25+ years.
I was the one that said "we'd be much further along with alternatives", and I get around 50% of my electrical power from one of those "alternatives". Getting the remaining 50% is just a matter of money (the inverter can handle it, but I'm waiting for the cost per watt of solar panels to come down before investing in more panels). I don't feel that going completely "off grid" is an environmental win after taking into account the batteries that are required, so i use net-metering with my power company to keep my power up 24x7.
Most of my transport is human powered (i.e. bike). I bike to work nearly every day (20 miles round trip - on most days my ride to work takes only about 15 minutes longer than the car commute since I don't get stuck in traffic on my bike. My next car may very well be electric (or a plug-in hybrid), but I have a perfectly usable 8 year old gas-powered car now, and I'll be keeping it for at least a few more years. Since my car is mostly used only on a weekends, solar charging through the week is viable.
My solar power system should pay itself back in 10 - 12 years, though admittedly that does take government sponsored incentives into account.
My water is preheated by solar, but it does go to a gas water heater for cloudy/overcast days. Nearly all of the USA could take advantage of solar hot water - systems work even in Alaska, though those long winter nights definitely cut into the average yearly yield.
Currently my heat comes from gas, though in my climate a heat pump is a viable solution and quite energy efficient (300% - 400% "efficiency"). It's hard to justify the expense though since I don't need much heat, in winter my gas bill is around $40 or less, in the summer it's $5 - $10. I don't know how much of that goes to my gas dryer.
I've checked Amazon for a few of the TV shows I'd like to get streamed on Netflix and Amazon doesn't have them for streaming either -- is there any reason to believe that Amazon will have a better streaming selection?
inactiviety timers fail easily. 5 minutes is enough time for a nurse to get called away, walk up to her terminal do something and walk away. for such a timer to be secure in a high secure environment you need it to be 30 seconds long at which point it is more of a hassle.
Please read my post - I was responding to the poster that said he has a PC in a room with 8 other employees, he's not a nurse in a patient's room:
A more useful system, IMHO, would be one that automatically logged off every PC in a room after a motion detector noted a period of inactivity. We do have issues where people leave for the day, go into another area or just close the door and leave systems up. That's a much bigger attack surface than leaving a PC logged in with 8 other employees wandering around.
Isn't a simple inactivity timer just as effective? Just set your PC's inactivity timer to whatever you'd set your motion sensor inactivity timer to (5 minutes, 10 minutes, whatever) and you've removed most of the threat of computers running unattended all day without the added complexity of a motion sensor (which, if it works as well as my office light sensor, will lock your computer out 5 times a day until you jump up from your chair and wave your arms so it can see movement).
I guess the point I was trying to make (but was remiss in not stating it plainly) is that there are different solutions for different environments. It's pointless to look at a solution for one person's environment and say "Bah! That's stupid! It would never work in my (completely different) environment.
Sure, there are 'technical fixes' - use a laptop (doesn't work well if I'm standing), use a tablet (none one them yet work with clunky Enterprise software that will not be significantly upgraded in my lifetime),
Run your clunky enterprise app on an Windows Terminal Server and RDP into it, the application need not know that you're on a tablet.
A more useful system, IMHO, would be one that automatically logged off every PC in a room after a motion detector noted a period of inactivity. We do have issues where people leave for the day, go into another area or just close the door and leave systems up. That's a much bigger attack surface than leaving a PC logged in with 8 other employees wandering around.
Isn't a simple inactivity timer just as effective? Just set your PC's inactivity timer to whatever you'd set your motion sensor inactivity timer to (5 minutes, 10 minutes, whatever) and you've removed most of the threat of computers running unattended all day without the added complexity of a motion sensor (which, if it works as well as my office light sensor, will lock your computer out 5 times a day until you jump up from your chair and wave your arms so it can see movement).
use a smart card system (we don't have one, aren't likely to get it)
So your employer won't install a smart card system, but will install motion sensors linked to your computers?
(just a reminder to Slashdotter's - not everyone is physically chained to their desk nor locked in the basement all day). I do this day in and day out. If the system logged me out every time I moved away from the keyboard or I had to log out every time my head didn't block the screen I would be one annoyed camper.
I must have missed the part in the article where it said this was a solution for everyone. It seems that this sonar keyboard is best suited for places where confidential information is keyed in and the computer should be locked immediately once someone steps away -- like at a doctor's office or pharmacist. Why would you think it would be applied to your case where you and your coworkers (who all have equal access rights to the computer) are in a room together?
Well, except that it takes approximately 7 gallons of oil to make an average tire, and your bike has two of them. Not including your seat, and possibly hand grips that also are made from oil.
That's 7 gallons for a *car* tire - an average car tire weighs around 20 lbs, my bike tire weighs around 1 lb. Figure about half the weight of each is from the rubber (cars have steel belts, my bike tire has a wire bead and kevlar belt), so that's a 40:1 ratio between the oil used to outfit a single car with tires alone to that used to outfit my bike. I get around 2-1/2 seasons out of my bike tires, while my car tires last around 5 years so that brings the ration down to only 20:1 -- so my bike tires use 5% of the oil as my car tires.
My handlebar grips are cork (which I feel works better than the synthetic stuff, especially when it gets wet), and my seat is leather.
I do use a (presumably) petroleum derived waxy lube for my chain, a 4 oz bottle lasts me about 2 - 3 years. Assuming a car needs at least twice yearly oil changes, and assume a bottle lasted me only one year, then that's a 64:1 ratio of petroleum use between a car and my bike.
But's not so much about eliminating all petroleum use it's about minimizing the use of petroleum for transportation because it's needed for so many other things.
OIL is used primarily as a TRANSPORTATION fuel. URANIUM is used primarily to GENERATE ELECTRICITY.... To be fair, if electric cars ever do take off in a big way, then things might be rather different
Well yeah, that's the point -- oil is too cheap for electric cars to take off in a big way. If oil were more expensive (either due to scarcity caused by limited drilling, or government action (i.e. taxes), electric cars may aready have taken off in a big way.
Why does this myth persist? Nuclear power is used to generate electricty. Oil produces about 1% of our electricity. In other words, if you think more nuclear capacity has anything to do with reducing oil usage, you've got a lot to learn.
Because if you have unlimited cheap electricity then many oil alternatives present themselves -- not just electric cars, but other alternative energy storage mechanisms like compressed gas, hydrogen (yes, I know hydrogen is not a fuel, it's an energy storage mechanism), etc. And when I say "cheap" I mean "cheap" as compared to fueling your car with oil. Oil is so cheap that it's hard for other technologies to compete, but it would be a lot easier to make the switch to alternative fuels while oil is still cheap than to wait until it's expensive.
Cars use around 40% of the petroleum in this country - if we could replace gas powered cars with alternatives, then we'd cut our oil usage almost in half -- more importantly, we'd have enough domestic oil production to meet our needs -- we'd have more control of our energy destiny, we wouldn't be sending billions of dollars to middle eastern countries that only like us for our money.
Come on, give us a break, if we didn't harvest fossil fuels civilisation would be far less advanced than we are now
Or, perhaps if we didn't drill for oil in high risk places, we'd be much farther along with alternatives to oil (including nuclear) and we wouldn't feel that we *have* to drill in water a mile deep.
It does a good job of reading the text in an intelligible manner - it does a pretty good job of correctly pronouncing English words (names and other unusual words are sometimes mispronounced).
However, i wouldn't count on it as a replacement for books on tape. Human readers use pauses, tone of voice, reading speed, etc to help convey what was written. The Text to Speech reader is monotone and always reads at the same pace (which is configurable for fast/medium/slow).
Now Stupid Coworker knows that it was me that reported him for sending me porn.
...because your boss is a dork. He should have send a message to Johnny Five (or everyone), "reminder: don't send porn to co-workers".
Uhh...yeah, that was kind of the point the parent poster was trying to make when he said:
Unfortunately, his boss is also a dipweed, and next thing I know, he's done a "Reply All" and said something like, "Hey, make sure you call x today, because we need this up and working for close of business."
People that don't recognize that they've been Bcc'ed and handle it appropriately appear to be dorks (or dipweeds).
BCC doesnt show other recipients, so if your boss scenario actually happened, either you don't know how to use BCC yourself, or he added everyone in by hand.
I think it's you that doesn't understand how BCC works, the parent poster's scenario is quite possible (and has happened to me)
I send:
From: Johnny Five To: Stupid Coworker Bcc: Big Boss
Dude, Stop sending me porn, I don't want to see it.
My Stupid Coworker doesn't know I Bcc'ed the boss since he doesn't see the Bcc list, however, if the Boss does a reply-all, then stupid Coworker gets this email from him:
From: Big Boss To: Stupid Coworker, Johnny Five
>Johnny Five wrote: > >Dude, Stop sending me porn, I don't want to see it.
Don't send porn to Johnny, send it to me instead.
Now Stupid Coworker knows that it was me that reported him for sending me porn.
Slashdot Mirror
For a better analogy, it's more like getting your fluids checked regularly: everyone born in the modern age *should* know to do this, but somehow some people manage to miss this lesson.
Actually, even that's not nearly as important as it used to be -- 20 years ago I used to check my oil and coolant nearly every week and sometimes the car actually needed one or the other.
I've had my current car for nearly 10 years and it has never needed oil, water or any other fluid (besides wiper fluid) to be topped up between oil changes. Now I'm lucky if I check my fluids once a month - often I don't check anything at all between oil changes. Maybe someday I'll get bitten by an oil or coolant leak that goes unnoticed until the oil pressure or temperature warning lights come on, but I'm willing to take that risk, which seems minimal. I'll notice a slow leak on my garage floor and a fast leak might drain the car between my weekly or monthly checks anyway.
I had one guy at IND tell me that what the machines put out is not radiation - it's the same stuff as what my cell phone puts out. I told him I worked on nuclear power plants for 6 years and I know what radiation is. The way he told me, I wondered what kind of propaganda the makers of those machines is feeding to the TSA agents.
He wasn't far from the truth, as far as I know, IND has the millimeter wave RF scanners:
http://www.wishtv.com/dpp/news/local/body-scanners-move-front-and-center-at-indy-airport
These operate in the EHF frequency band (30-300Ghz), or around 20 - 200 times higher in frequency than your phone, but still considered non-ionizing RF radiation. Granted, any RF field is still "radiation", but it's much different than the ionizing radiation of x-ray scanners.
If you're not afraid to use your cell phone, then you probably shouldn't be afraid of these machines (at least not because of "radiation").
I'm not so sure of that. I've read a lot of the complaints that purport to come from researchers "in the field", and while they are in fact from researchers and even from researchers in related fields, they usually aren't really from researchers in the field. More to the point, though (since oncologists are reasonably allowed to have opinions about radiation devices), they seem to be written by researchers who either are ignorant of the facts or intentionally ignore the facts
Then how about 4 UCSF professors are are: an imaging expert and professor of biochemistry and biophysics, a world renown cancer expert, and x-ray crytrallographers and imaging experts? Surely one of those guys knows a thing or two about x-ray imaging and have a valid reason for concern?
http://www.npr.org/assets/news/2010/05/17/concern.pdf
Those are some pretty big if's:
1. The safety of the machines hasn't been proven, they haven't been out long enough to compile long term statistics on their safety to the public and to the people running the scanners. Xrays are ionizing radiation, and even if they don't penetrate the skin I can't imagine that messing around with skin cell DNA molecules is healthy for anyone and there are some real questions about the effects of the machines. What safeguards are in the machine to monitor X-ray levels and prevent overdosing? Everyone here knows that even if there are safeguards in place, they are not foolproof.
2. The security of the scanners is quite another unknown - who will be viewing the images? What precautions are taking to protect the privacy of the virtually naked pictures of an unsuspecting public?
And the biggest "if": Have the machines proven to be effective? Some researchers have already found trivial ways to bypass the scanners (hiding contraband in a body cavity is the obvious hole (no pun intended), but they also found that you can tape high explosives to your body to conceal it. And a typical bus station or stadium has more security holes than an airport (which have already been shown to have a porous perimeter despite the security screenings), so why should we think that scanning the public will enhance security at all?
I don't see the point of this phone -- why run apps from the phone at all when it's in the dock? Put a powerful processor in the dock and run the apps on the (presumably much faster) dock processor when the phone is docked -- mount the filesystem from the phone so all of your files are available.
Running apps (except firefox) from the phone itself seems like a gimmick that doesn't really accomplish anything useful.
It's unfortunate for us but there'll always be a demand for locked phones. Services like Netflix will never officially appear on a device which is completely open to modification.
And there's the whole corporate market -- many corporations have a legal mendate (or just corporate policy) to keep email secure and the only devices they can allow to connect to their mail servers on ones that they can enforce a password lock policy that allows remote wipe and auto-wipe after a number of unlock fails.
A rooted phone can allow the user to violate these policies.
I found some more information about the PDP-1, and it looks like it could complete 200K operations/second (100K multiplies).
It cost $120K in 1960, or around $900K in today's dollars.
I still don't know how fast the emulator is, but I bet it's faster than the original.
The emulator runs (slowly) on my Android phone so I guess a Javascript emulator weighs less than or equal to 169 grams.
(though I can't seem to get the keyboard controls to work - when I press a key, it ends up in the address bar),
How does the speed of this Javascript emulator (on a typical PC) compare to the original hardware PDP-1?
>
Dependency on countries and regimes openly declaring the US as an enemy..everytime you fuel your car ..you are funding terrorism. Thats the BIG PRICE
Wouldn't it be better to just not get in your car than to support environmentally hazardous fuel extraction? Are people really supposed to feel better about themselves knowing that our fossil fuel dependency is "only" causing earthquakes in Arkansas, and "only" contaminating water in Pennsyvania and "only" leaving millions of barrels of oil at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico?
Granted, there's no way to eliminate all oil use in our lifetimes, but there's a *lot* that can be done to reduce transportation fuel use by moving to more fuel efficient cars.
You may say that you have no choice but to use your car, but you do have a choice, you could live in a city or large suburb with effective public transportation, and good bikability and walkability. You just chose to make a car an integral part of your lifestyle - many people in big cities live without any car.
What idiot trusts a single hard drive?
Pretty much every idiot that is buying a computer at Best Buy - while most people know that they *should* be backing up their data, few do. Of all of the non-techy computer users I know, only one is backing up her data, and that's because her operating system came bundled with software that makes it trivally easy: Time Machine. Does Win7 come with any easy to use backup software?
Windows seems to go out of its way to make it difficult to backup software and application data needed to recover in the event of a drive failure. Since some applications choose to store data in their own application data folder, even if a user backs up MyDocuments regularly, they can still lose data in the event of a hard drive crash.
I've been using Windows for years, but still have no idea how to back up an application such that I can restore it and all of my settings on a new hard drive (without doing a full-disk backup)
But just as bad (or worse) are those that say "I don't need backups, I have RAID!". Those are the people that know the importance of backups, but choose to ignore them because they think RAID protects them.
The idea that everyone should personally handle backing up their email is insanity. If you're a professional at this stuff, then fine, do it at home as well. But for nearly everyone in the population, gmail is going to be vastly more reliable than any backup scheme they come up with at home.
Backing up your hosted email doesn't mean having to run your own SMTP daemon... I don't see how making a backup of cloud hosted data could be construed as bad advice. It's not hard to use an IMAP client that stores a copy of messages locally, and no matter how bad the user's backups are, Gmail + some local backup is better than Gmail + no local backup.
This isn't the first time Google has lost email and it won't be the last.
Oh, that explains it, it's very versatile in a number of features and supports various enterprise and Web scenarios.
Others here on Slashdot are very familiar (perhaps too familiar) and still aren't sure what features of Sharepoint lend themselves to this sort of eBook lending system, and what exactly a "sharepoint like" portal is. Is it similar to a Drupal like portal? Or a Wiki like portal?
My solar power system should pay itself back in 10 - 12 years, though admittedly that does take government sponsored incentives into account.
Then it's not really paying itself back, is it? All it's doing is stealing from your neighbors in order to get a free ride.
Well, another way to look at it is that I put up my own money to help the government subsidize the burgeoning solar power industry.
I bought my system several years ago when panels were not quite as cost effective - had I bought today, the *unsubsidized* payback period would have been around 12 - 14 years (subsidized would be around 7 years). So my money helped to drive the development and production of today's more efficient panels, so I think the government got some value in my subsidy.
Alternative energy tax credits cost the country around $1B/year - contrast with Ethanol subsidies that cost around $7B/year and do nothing to help with energy independance (depending who you talk to, Ethanol is either a small net-positive in energy gain or a net negative)
Yes, subsidizing a technology to foster innovation can be a good idea but that should be long gone for solar energy. I mean, it's been subsidized for what, 30 years now? Lets face it, the technology hasn't been anywhere close to being mainstream for a long time and it still isn't there. Right solar cells still create more harm to the environment when they are manufactured than they save over their whole life.
Give the scientists more time to research solar. In the meantime drop the subsidies and go with what's tried and true: nuclear
I agree that Nuclear is a much better than coal and other non-renewable fuels, but Solar (and Wind in some areas) still shows promise. For $35K (the price many people pay for a car), I could generate 100% of my power for the next 25+ years.
I was the one that said "we'd be much further along with alternatives", and I get around 50% of my electrical power from one of those "alternatives". Getting the remaining 50% is just a matter of money (the inverter can handle it, but I'm waiting for the cost per watt of solar panels to come down before investing in more panels). I don't feel that going completely "off grid" is an environmental win after taking into account the batteries that are required, so i use net-metering with my power company to keep my power up 24x7.
Most of my transport is human powered (i.e. bike). I bike to work nearly every day (20 miles round trip - on most days my ride to work takes only about 15 minutes longer than the car commute since I don't get stuck in traffic on my bike. My next car may very well be electric (or a plug-in hybrid), but I have a perfectly usable 8 year old gas-powered car now, and I'll be keeping it for at least a few more years. Since my car is mostly used only on a weekends, solar charging through the week is viable.
My solar power system should pay itself back in 10 - 12 years, though admittedly that does take government sponsored incentives into account.
My water is preheated by solar, but it does go to a gas water heater for cloudy/overcast days. Nearly all of the USA could take advantage of solar hot water - systems work even in Alaska, though those long winter nights definitely cut into the average yearly yield.
Currently my heat comes from gas, though in my climate a heat pump is a viable solution and quite energy efficient (300% - 400% "efficiency"). It's hard to justify the expense though since I don't need much heat, in winter my gas bill is around $40 or less, in the summer it's $5 - $10. I don't know how much of that goes to my gas dryer.
I've checked Amazon for a few of the TV shows I'd like to get streamed on Netflix and Amazon doesn't have them for streaming either -- is there any reason to believe that Amazon will have a better streaming selection?
inactiviety timers fail easily. 5 minutes is enough time for a nurse to get called away, walk up to her terminal do something and walk away. for such a timer to be secure in a high secure environment you need it to be 30 seconds long at which point it is more of a hassle.
Please read my post - I was responding to the poster that said he has a PC in a room with 8 other employees, he's not a nurse in a patient's room:
A more useful system, IMHO, would be one that automatically logged off every PC in a room after a motion detector noted a period of inactivity. We do have issues where people leave for the day, go into another area or just close the door and leave systems up. That's a much bigger attack surface than leaving a PC logged in with 8 other employees wandering around.
Isn't a simple inactivity timer just as effective? Just set your PC's inactivity timer to whatever you'd set your motion sensor inactivity timer to (5 minutes, 10 minutes, whatever) and you've removed most of the threat of computers running unattended all day without the added complexity of a motion sensor (which, if it works as well as my office light sensor, will lock your computer out 5 times a day until you jump up from your chair and wave your arms so it can see movement).
I guess the point I was trying to make (but was remiss in not stating it plainly) is that there are different solutions for different environments. It's pointless to look at a solution for one person's environment and say "Bah! That's stupid! It would never work in my (completely different) environment.
Sure, there are 'technical fixes' - use a laptop (doesn't work well if I'm standing), use a tablet (none one them yet work with clunky Enterprise software that will not be significantly upgraded in my lifetime),
Run your clunky enterprise app on an Windows Terminal Server and RDP into it, the application need not know that you're on a tablet.
A more useful system, IMHO, would be one that automatically logged off every PC in a room after a motion detector noted a period of inactivity. We do have issues where people leave for the day, go into another area or just close the door and leave systems up. That's a much bigger attack surface than leaving a PC logged in with 8 other employees wandering around.
Isn't a simple inactivity timer just as effective? Just set your PC's inactivity timer to whatever you'd set your motion sensor inactivity timer to (5 minutes, 10 minutes, whatever) and you've removed most of the threat of computers running unattended all day without the added complexity of a motion sensor (which, if it works as well as my office light sensor, will lock your computer out 5 times a day until you jump up from your chair and wave your arms so it can see movement).
use a smart card system (we don't have one, aren't likely to get it)
So your employer won't install a smart card system, but will install motion sensors linked to your computers?
(just a reminder to Slashdotter's - not everyone is physically chained to their desk nor locked in the basement all day). I do this day in and day out. If the system logged me out every time I moved away from the keyboard or I had to log out every time my head didn't block the screen I would be one annoyed camper.
I must have missed the part in the article where it said this was a solution for everyone. It seems that this sonar keyboard is best suited for places where confidential information is keyed in and the computer should be locked immediately once someone steps away -- like at a doctor's office or pharmacist. Why would you think it would be applied to your case where you and your coworkers (who all have equal access rights to the computer) are in a room together?
Well, except that it takes approximately 7 gallons of oil to make an average tire, and your bike has two of them. Not including your seat, and possibly hand grips that also are made from oil.
That's 7 gallons for a *car* tire - an average car tire weighs around 20 lbs, my bike tire weighs around 1 lb. Figure about half the weight of each is from the rubber (cars have steel belts, my bike tire has a wire bead and kevlar belt), so that's a 40:1 ratio between the oil used to outfit a single car with tires alone to that used to outfit my bike. I get around 2-1/2 seasons out of my bike tires, while my car tires last around 5 years so that brings the ration down to only 20:1 -- so my bike tires use 5% of the oil as my car tires.
My handlebar grips are cork (which I feel works better than the synthetic stuff, especially when it gets wet), and my seat is leather.
I do use a (presumably) petroleum derived waxy lube for my chain, a 4 oz bottle lasts me about 2 - 3 years. Assuming a car needs at least twice yearly oil changes, and assume a bottle lasted me only one year, then that's a 64:1 ratio of petroleum use between a car and my bike.
But's not so much about eliminating all petroleum use it's about minimizing the use of petroleum for transportation because it's needed for so many other things.
OIL is used primarily as a TRANSPORTATION fuel. ...
URANIUM is used primarily to GENERATE ELECTRICITY.
To be fair, if electric cars ever do take off in a big way, then things might be rather different
Well yeah, that's the point -- oil is too cheap for electric cars to take off in a big way. If oil were more expensive (either due to scarcity caused by limited drilling, or government action (i.e. taxes), electric cars may aready have taken off in a big way.
Why does this myth persist? Nuclear power is used to generate electricty. Oil produces about 1% of our electricity. In other words, if you think more nuclear capacity has anything to do with reducing oil usage, you've got a lot to learn.
Because if you have unlimited cheap electricity then many oil alternatives present themselves -- not just electric cars, but other alternative energy storage mechanisms like compressed gas, hydrogen (yes, I know hydrogen is not a fuel, it's an energy storage mechanism), etc. And when I say "cheap" I mean "cheap" as compared to fueling your car with oil. Oil is so cheap that it's hard for other technologies to compete, but it would be a lot easier to make the switch to alternative fuels while oil is still cheap than to wait until it's expensive.
Cars use around 40% of the petroleum in this country - if we could replace gas powered cars with alternatives, then we'd cut our oil usage almost in half -- more importantly, we'd have enough domestic oil production to meet our needs -- we'd have more control of our energy destiny, we wouldn't be sending billions of dollars to middle eastern countries that only like us for our money.
Come on, give us a break, if we didn't harvest fossil fuels civilisation would be far less advanced than we are now
Or, perhaps if we didn't drill for oil in high risk places, we'd be much farther along with alternatives to oil (including nuclear) and we wouldn't feel that we *have* to drill in water a mile deep.
It does a good job of reading the text in an intelligible manner - it does a pretty good job of correctly pronouncing English words (names and other unusual words are sometimes mispronounced).
However, i wouldn't count on it as a replacement for books on tape. Human readers use pauses, tone of voice, reading speed, etc to help convey what was written. The Text to Speech reader is monotone and always reads at the same pace (which is configurable for fast/medium/slow).
Here's an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsnCwQTqbzM
...because your boss is a dork. He should have send a message to Johnny Five (or everyone), "reminder: don't send porn to co-workers".
Uhh...yeah, that was kind of the point the parent poster was trying to make when he said:
Unfortunately, his boss is also a dipweed, and next thing I know, he's done a "Reply All" and said something like, "Hey, make sure you call x today, because we need this up and working for close of business."
People that don't recognize that they've been Bcc'ed and handle it appropriately appear to be dorks (or dipweeds).
BCC doesnt show other recipients, so if your boss scenario actually happened, either you don't know how to use BCC yourself, or he added everyone in by hand.
I think it's you that doesn't understand how BCC works, the parent poster's scenario is quite possible (and has happened to me)
I send:
From: Johnny Five
To: Stupid Coworker
Bcc: Big Boss
Dude, Stop sending me porn, I don't want to see it.
My Stupid Coworker doesn't know I Bcc'ed the boss since he doesn't see the Bcc list, however, if the Boss does a reply-all, then stupid Coworker gets this email from him:
From: Big Boss
To: Stupid Coworker, Johnny Five
>Johnny Five wrote:
>
>Dude, Stop sending me porn, I don't want to see it.
Don't send porn to Johnny, send it to me instead.
Now Stupid Coworker knows that it was me that reported him for sending me porn.