My house is up on a hill, and mosquitoes tend to live and fly relatively low. Put it above eye level at my place, and you won't get a lot of dead skeeters.
Still, for some applications this could be useful.
You nuke the females because they are the only ones that bite, and the purpose of the exercise is not to wipe out the population entirely (since that would severely mess with the food chain) but to reduce the biting population in your immediate vicinity.
And, yeah, I'm totally on board with adding biting black flies, horse flies, and deer flies. We have all three in Maine, and damn those things can hurt.
First, mosquitoes are only one thing at their level of the food chain. Flies, noseeums, and plenty of other non-biting insects live at the same level.
Second, this is actually better than most current solutions. Mosquito magnets and skeeter deleters and other things attract all manner of insects, not just mosquitoes. Don't get me started on spray permethrin and other insecticides.
Third, mosquito populations are WAY up in my area because bats are being wiped out by that nose fungus infection. I haven't seen a bat in my area in a couple of years, unfortunately, and they used to be common.
Fourth, these units would only work in the immediate vicinity of houses. In my area, that means there's still a few hundred acres behind my house that remain prime mosquito real estate. I only want my yard, they can have the marsh.
And, finally, I don't care. I am, in fact, that self-centered.
I've tried several variants of that, most recently the "Mosquito Magnet", and while they work pretty well, they are also pretty expensive to run (refill the tank every 3 weeks, attractants add up, and they pull a decent amount of power) and you're damned lucky if you get two seasons out of them.
True, but skeeters are usually active at dusk and after. Two possibilities.
1. If it can recognize shapes, have it shut down whenever a larger animal is within 10-15 degrees of the beam. I mean, this thing is already accurately identifying specific species of mosquito, right? How hard would it be to put a "don't fire if something bigger than a housefly is emitting heat in the range of fire" system in?
2. Put it on a timer or switch, and only turn it on when everyone is inside, and put it away from windows (this would only work, of course, if you live like me - in the woods with no neighbors).
I think this would be a sudden enough change that evolution wouldn't have time to have any effect. It'd be a pretty radical change over a short period. Unless there are currently large male mosquitoes whose wings beat at lower frequencies, there won't be many mosquito Casanovas for the skeeterettes to find. And since they use wingbeat frequency to find each other, the females will think it's another female anyway.
But, if the skeeters do evolve, there's always a firmware update.
Personally, I want this, and I want to be able to program it for those pesky little stripe-winged deerflies too. Those bastards are persistent, and they have a nasty bite. Give me one that can take down skeeters and deerflies and really works, I'll happily shell out $250.
I'm from Maine and I live in the woods near some marshland. If this thing works 1/4 as well as advertised I'd happily pay $200 for one if they wanted to use something similar to the "OLPC" model.
At a manufacturing cost of $50, that's one for me to enjoy my backyard, two for third-world countries fighting malaria, and $50 profit for the manufacturer.
There is no "might", the cat is in a quantum indeterminate state. It is simultaneously alive AND dead. You don't even have to lie, just tell a half-truth. Tell everyone that the cat is alive and well, they spend money, and the cat becomes alive and well because lots of spending can dig us out of any bumps in the economy.
First practical use of quantum theory I've ever seen.
Fine, then the government allows bankruptcy to happen, but does so in a way that protects the innocent to the greatest extent possible.
If the banksurance companies and inbankvestment firms and all these complicated messes go under, there is still financial instrumentation behind the veil. People have mortgages, and car loans, and bank accounts, and other stuff. The financial institutions themselves also have expensive saleable assets, like corporate offices, real estate, and corporate cars and jets.
Mortgages and other loans are still fine - no one loses their house. Well, OK, a few do, and that's unfortunate, but fewer than we had this time around. Put all the mortgages into the receivership pool and let other banks bid on them. A new bank will pay the court to take over the profitable ones, and those profits plus the failed bank's assets are used to prop up the unprofitable ones and get them parceled out to a bank that knows what they are getting. Still costs a shitload of money, and you don't save everyone's houses, but it costs less than bailing out a bank and more people stay in their homes.
Banks go bye-bye, their CEOs and management employees who pulled all this hokum get their assets seized to the extent that SOX allows. The rank-and-file bankers find new jobs in the banks that expand or form to fill the void. We still need bankers. Always will.
The banks have been screaming for less regulation for decades. We gave it to them. They used that freedom to play games and cheat each other with unnecessarily complex financial instruments. Then they blackmailed us with "we're too BIG to fail."
They need to learn from their mistakes and be taught that they CAN fail if they mess up, or we need massive sweeping new regulations so we can protect the taxpayers from something like this happening again. The banks are either free to do as they like and must suffer the consequences of their mistakes, or must be under a nanny state microscope to prevent them from playing fast and loose and expecting me to foot the bill next time they screw up. Pick one. I lean toward less regulation and no chance of bailout, but I've almost stopped caring which.
Because the labels have less input into what I listen to on Pandora (than on FM radio), their marketing efforts are less effective.
I disagree. I pay a lot more attention to the music I listen to on Pandora because more of it is interesting to me. I also have the artist's bio at my fingertips, and I'm far more likely to make an impulse purchase.
Pandora is a near-perfect combination of radio and on-demand from a music marketing perspective. I don't get to pick individual songs, but music gets limited to stuff that I'm likely to want to listen to and therefore buy.
Clearchannel may have absolute control over the radio, and they may be able to market that music to a larger audience, but it's scattershot advertising. They have to throw a song out there and hope it sticks.
Pandora is targeted advertising of music, under the transparent guise of letting you listen to free music. Once you hear a song on Pandora, it's unlikely you'll hear it again anytime soon, so if you want it you will have to buy it. And Pandora's selection certainly brings up a lot of stuff their listeners will want, since the music is targeted to the tastes of that specific listener.
Streaming services where the listener has *absolute* control over what content gets played are a clear threat to the labels. Streaming services where the listener only controls the types of music but not the specific song are the greatest marketing engine a record label could possibly hope for.
These guys should be falling all over themselves to give Pandora all the music they have, and BEGGING (no, PAYING) Pandora to play it. A lot.
Pandora is, at its heart, a gathering of interested customers who willingly reveal their purchase preferences and ask to be exposed to new music in return for the right to listen to tracks you have chosen for them based on those preferences. Those customers can then purchase music directly from within the application, or research the artist further to see if they want to buy more of their music.
If there are marketers out there and the previous paragraph did not make you orgasm uncontrollably, you need to go back to marketing school and pay attention this time.
I've discovered a bunch of new artists through Pandora, and even purchased music from a select few. I neither know nor care who the artist is signed up through. I use free streaming media to discover new artists, and if I like the artist I might go out and buy an album or two from them. I couldn't name the label that my last 10 CDs came from, though I could list off the artists.
If Warner chooses to withdraw their catalog from Pandora, well, that's their decision and they are well within their rights to do so. It means that I, for one, will not hear any of their new music. But there are plenty of talented artists out there who use more enlightened labels that actually want their artists' work to be discovered. I won't lack for good music to discover, it just won't include Warner's product.
Doesn't matter to me. If they don't want to market to me any more, that's their right.
A suggestion for the future: If you are in the middle of doing work you feel is critical, hold off on loading a huge whack of Microsoft patches the day they come out. If your dissertation was due tomorrow, this weekend would have been an excellent time to celebrate Patch Tuesday. And you could have read about the issues others were experiencing and maybe held off until a patch to the patch came out.
Seriously, if you're running a decent antivirus client and you practice minimal safe surfing, you can wait a week or two to load the latest security patches. Let the alpha-geeks who load this stuff quickly run into the patch brick walls, that's what we (*) live for.
(*) This is my first Patch Tuesday completely Microsoft-free, so "we" no longer includes me. I read about the large set of patches, and chuckled because I don't have to load them!
Oh, and back up your data often. And ESPECIALLY before loading a motherload Patch Tuesday set!!!!
Someone else mentioned earlier that they got miserable startup times in Win2000 but much better in newer versions, and of course OO is heavily dependent on Java.
OO's startup times in Windows XP used to bug the crap out of me. Doubleclick on a spreadsheet, and it might be a minute or so, sometimes more, before you were off to the races. This was on a decent Athlon64 2 GHz with 1GB RAM, not exactly a slouch of a machine.
Then I tried it on my old Athlon 1.3Ghz with 384MB RAM in Linux Mint, and it started in about 10 seconds.
On my new beast (Athlon II 3.0GHz, 4GB RAM, Linux Mint) OpenOffice starts in just a few seconds.
I was utterly astonished at the speed difference of OO between Windows and Linux, and it makes perfect sense to me why Windows users don't like it as much - it's a dog. I hope they've improved its Windows performance in 3.2, for the sake of those using it on Windows.
Honestly, if the government wanted to shut down communications the last place I'd expect them to bother would be at the desktop. Send marines to the major routing hubs, and you'll get a lot more bang for a lot less buck. Computers may still work, but they can't talk to each other.
It closes two major loopholes in their current model.
1. Corporate keys that have been leaked or resold to unknowing consumers can now be shut off. If you bought your copy of Windows at a price that seems too good to be true, it probably was someone who resold a corporate site license to a lot of people, which is not a legal copy of Windows. Unfortunately, many smaller builders also use this technique, making their customers unknowing pirates.
2. A current hole allowing multiple computers for the same key can be enforced. As it stands today, WGA in Windows XP activates the machine and then, after 90 days, will activate on another machine with the same license key without problems. However, the issue is that you no longer have the right to run the original computer's copy of XP when you activate it on the new computer - you're allowed one machine at a time. You could get away with up to four XP installs per key per year with no consequences as long as you made no hardware changes to any of the older machines.
I thought Lucas did a good job of that with Episodes I, II, and III. Anything Brooks could do with that would be undoubtedly brilliant, but -1 Redundant.
Remember that the whole purpose of the Star Trek "Reboot" was to form a new timeline so they could finally and completely destroy the Trek Canonical that every Trekkie has on the tip of his/her tongue. The new series happens in a completely new universe, starting with Kirk getting his ship (probably), and when the Gorn appears on screen no one can pull out their (ok, "our" - grin) detailed notes on Trek and say there are four too many pimples on his left testicle and that his growl is 1/1000 octave too low.
Using a time warp was a cheap trick, but it was very effective in getting the job done. The Trek universe we grew up watching has been relegated to "parallel universe" status and needs never be referred to again in regards to the new series.
"Lens Flare" Abrams is now free to change the curtains in the Ready Room without invoking a Trekstorm. And pretty much any other damned thing he wants to change.
And that's actually good. If we're going to have a reboot, it needs to bring a fresh perspective. The old Trek universe was collapsing under its own weight.
Slashdot Mirror
That's OK, some snot-nosed little kid will utter "Unix! I know this system" and use a nonexistent and nonintuitive GUI to fix everything instantly.
Simple, elegant, but limited.
My house is up on a hill, and mosquitoes tend to live and fly relatively low. Put it above eye level at my place, and you won't get a lot of dead skeeters.
Still, for some applications this could be useful.
When the mosquitoes adapt, the machine just needs a firmware upgrade.
You nuke the females because they are the only ones that bite, and the purpose of the exercise is not to wipe out the population entirely (since that would severely mess with the food chain) but to reduce the biting population in your immediate vicinity.
And, yeah, I'm totally on board with adding biting black flies, horse flies, and deer flies. We have all three in Maine, and damn those things can hurt.
First, mosquitoes are only one thing at their level of the food chain. Flies, noseeums, and plenty of other non-biting insects live at the same level.
Second, this is actually better than most current solutions. Mosquito magnets and skeeter deleters and other things attract all manner of insects, not just mosquitoes. Don't get me started on spray permethrin and other insecticides.
Third, mosquito populations are WAY up in my area because bats are being wiped out by that nose fungus infection. I haven't seen a bat in my area in a couple of years, unfortunately, and they used to be common.
Fourth, these units would only work in the immediate vicinity of houses. In my area, that means there's still a few hundred acres behind my house that remain prime mosquito real estate. I only want my yard, they can have the marsh.
And, finally, I don't care. I am, in fact, that self-centered.
Sorry, even at best it can only do 50 to 100 bugs per second. You'd need a lot of them.
I've tried several variants of that, most recently the "Mosquito Magnet", and while they work pretty well, they are also pretty expensive to run (refill the tank every 3 weeks, attractants add up, and they pull a decent amount of power) and you're damned lucky if you get two seasons out of them.
True, but skeeters are usually active at dusk and after. Two possibilities.
1. If it can recognize shapes, have it shut down whenever a larger animal is within 10-15 degrees of the beam. I mean, this thing is already accurately identifying specific species of mosquito, right? How hard would it be to put a "don't fire if something bigger than a housefly is emitting heat in the range of fire" system in?
2. Put it on a timer or switch, and only turn it on when everyone is inside, and put it away from windows (this would only work, of course, if you live like me - in the woods with no neighbors).
I think this would be a sudden enough change that evolution wouldn't have time to have any effect. It'd be a pretty radical change over a short period. Unless there are currently large male mosquitoes whose wings beat at lower frequencies, there won't be many mosquito Casanovas for the skeeterettes to find. And since they use wingbeat frequency to find each other, the females will think it's another female anyway.
But, if the skeeters do evolve, there's always a firmware update.
Personally, I want this, and I want to be able to program it for those pesky little stripe-winged deerflies too. Those bastards are persistent, and they have a nasty bite. Give me one that can take down skeeters and deerflies and really works, I'll happily shell out $250.
I'm from Maine and I live in the woods near some marshland. If this thing works 1/4 as well as advertised I'd happily pay $200 for one if they wanted to use something similar to the "OLPC" model.
At a manufacturing cost of $50, that's one for me to enjoy my backyard, two for third-world countries fighting malaria, and $50 profit for the manufacturer.
There is no "might", the cat is in a quantum indeterminate state. It is simultaneously alive AND dead. You don't even have to lie, just tell a half-truth. Tell everyone that the cat is alive and well, they spend money, and the cat becomes alive and well because lots of spending can dig us out of any bumps in the economy.
First practical use of quantum theory I've ever seen.
Fine, then the government allows bankruptcy to happen, but does so in a way that protects the innocent to the greatest extent possible.
If the banksurance companies and inbankvestment firms and all these complicated messes go under, there is still financial instrumentation behind the veil. People have mortgages, and car loans, and bank accounts, and other stuff. The financial institutions themselves also have expensive saleable assets, like corporate offices, real estate, and corporate cars and jets.
Mortgages and other loans are still fine - no one loses their house. Well, OK, a few do, and that's unfortunate, but fewer than we had this time around. Put all the mortgages into the receivership pool and let other banks bid on them. A new bank will pay the court to take over the profitable ones, and those profits plus the failed bank's assets are used to prop up the unprofitable ones and get them parceled out to a bank that knows what they are getting. Still costs a shitload of money, and you don't save everyone's houses, but it costs less than bailing out a bank and more people stay in their homes.
Banks go bye-bye, their CEOs and management employees who pulled all this hokum get their assets seized to the extent that SOX allows. The rank-and-file bankers find new jobs in the banks that expand or form to fill the void. We still need bankers. Always will.
The banks have been screaming for less regulation for decades. We gave it to them. They used that freedom to play games and cheat each other with unnecessarily complex financial instruments. Then they blackmailed us with "we're too BIG to fail."
They need to learn from their mistakes and be taught that they CAN fail if they mess up, or we need massive sweeping new regulations so we can protect the taxpayers from something like this happening again. The banks are either free to do as they like and must suffer the consequences of their mistakes, or must be under a nanny state microscope to prevent them from playing fast and loose and expecting me to foot the bill next time they screw up. Pick one. I lean toward less regulation and no chance of bailout, but I've almost stopped caring which.
Agreed (posting to undo an accidental mod - dang twitchy pulldown).
Because the labels have less input into what I listen to on Pandora (than on FM radio), their marketing efforts are less effective.
I disagree. I pay a lot more attention to the music I listen to on Pandora because more of it is interesting to me. I also have the artist's bio at my fingertips, and I'm far more likely to make an impulse purchase.
Pandora is a near-perfect combination of radio and on-demand from a music marketing perspective. I don't get to pick individual songs, but music gets limited to stuff that I'm likely to want to listen to and therefore buy.
Clearchannel may have absolute control over the radio, and they may be able to market that music to a larger audience, but it's scattershot advertising. They have to throw a song out there and hope it sticks.
Pandora is targeted advertising of music, under the transparent guise of letting you listen to free music. Once you hear a song on Pandora, it's unlikely you'll hear it again anytime soon, so if you want it you will have to buy it. And Pandora's selection certainly brings up a lot of stuff their listeners will want, since the music is targeted to the tastes of that specific listener.
Streaming services where the listener has *absolute* control over what content gets played are a clear threat to the labels. Streaming services where the listener only controls the types of music but not the specific song are the greatest marketing engine a record label could possibly hope for.
These guys should be falling all over themselves to give Pandora all the music they have, and BEGGING (no, PAYING) Pandora to play it. A lot.
Pandora is, at its heart, a gathering of interested customers who willingly reveal their purchase preferences and ask to be exposed to new music in return for the right to listen to tracks you have chosen for them based on those preferences. Those customers can then purchase music directly from within the application, or research the artist further to see if they want to buy more of their music.
If there are marketers out there and the previous paragraph did not make you orgasm uncontrollably, you need to go back to marketing school and pay attention this time.
Yes, it is a pity. For Warner. I could care less.
I've discovered a bunch of new artists through Pandora, and even purchased music from a select few. I neither know nor care who the artist is signed up through. I use free streaming media to discover new artists, and if I like the artist I might go out and buy an album or two from them. I couldn't name the label that my last 10 CDs came from, though I could list off the artists.
If Warner chooses to withdraw their catalog from Pandora, well, that's their decision and they are well within their rights to do so. It means that I, for one, will not hear any of their new music. But there are plenty of talented artists out there who use more enlightened labels that actually want their artists' work to be discovered. I won't lack for good music to discover, it just won't include Warner's product.
Doesn't matter to me. If they don't want to market to me any more, that's their right.
A suggestion for the future: If you are in the middle of doing work you feel is critical, hold off on loading a huge whack of Microsoft patches the day they come out. If your dissertation was due tomorrow, this weekend would have been an excellent time to celebrate Patch Tuesday. And you could have read about the issues others were experiencing and maybe held off until a patch to the patch came out.
Seriously, if you're running a decent antivirus client and you practice minimal safe surfing, you can wait a week or two to load the latest security patches. Let the alpha-geeks who load this stuff quickly run into the patch brick walls, that's what we (*) live for.
(*) This is my first Patch Tuesday completely Microsoft-free, so "we" no longer includes me. I read about the large set of patches, and chuckled because I don't have to load them!
Oh, and back up your data often. And ESPECIALLY before loading a motherload Patch Tuesday set!!!!
Ah, that might have been it.
Someone else mentioned earlier that they got miserable startup times in Win2000 but much better in newer versions, and of course OO is heavily dependent on Java.
In other words, about as relevant as Clippy, but far more interesting.
OO's startup times in Windows XP used to bug the crap out of me. Doubleclick on a spreadsheet, and it might be a minute or so, sometimes more, before you were off to the races. This was on a decent Athlon64 2 GHz with 1GB RAM, not exactly a slouch of a machine.
Then I tried it on my old Athlon 1.3Ghz with 384MB RAM in Linux Mint, and it started in about 10 seconds.
On my new beast (Athlon II 3.0GHz, 4GB RAM, Linux Mint) OpenOffice starts in just a few seconds.
I was utterly astonished at the speed difference of OO between Windows and Linux, and it makes perfect sense to me why Windows users don't like it as much - it's a dog. I hope they've improved its Windows performance in 3.2, for the sake of those using it on Windows.
Does CowboyNeal have an avatar?
Honestly, if the government wanted to shut down communications the last place I'd expect them to bother would be at the desktop. Send marines to the major routing hubs, and you'll get a lot more bang for a lot less buck. Computers may still work, but they can't talk to each other.
It closes two major loopholes in their current model.
1. Corporate keys that have been leaked or resold to unknowing consumers can now be shut off. If you bought your copy of Windows at a price that seems too good to be true, it probably was someone who resold a corporate site license to a lot of people, which is not a legal copy of Windows. Unfortunately, many smaller builders also use this technique, making their customers unknowing pirates.
2. A current hole allowing multiple computers for the same key can be enforced. As it stands today, WGA in Windows XP activates the machine and then, after 90 days, will activate on another machine with the same license key without problems. However, the issue is that you no longer have the right to run the original computer's copy of XP when you activate it on the new computer - you're allowed one machine at a time. You could get away with up to four XP installs per key per year with no consequences as long as you made no hardware changes to any of the older machines.
but people really do get a little overly wrapped up
-1 severe understatement. :)
I thought Lucas did a good job of that with Episodes I, II, and III. Anything Brooks could do with that would be undoubtedly brilliant, but -1 Redundant.
Remember that the whole purpose of the Star Trek "Reboot" was to form a new timeline so they could finally and completely destroy the Trek Canonical that every Trekkie has on the tip of his/her tongue. The new series happens in a completely new universe, starting with Kirk getting his ship (probably), and when the Gorn appears on screen no one can pull out their (ok, "our" - grin) detailed notes on Trek and say there are four too many pimples on his left testicle and that his growl is 1/1000 octave too low.
Using a time warp was a cheap trick, but it was very effective in getting the job done. The Trek universe we grew up watching has been relegated to "parallel universe" status and needs never be referred to again in regards to the new series.
"Lens Flare" Abrams is now free to change the curtains in the Ready Room without invoking a Trekstorm. And pretty much any other damned thing he wants to change.
And that's actually good. If we're going to have a reboot, it needs to bring a fresh perspective. The old Trek universe was collapsing under its own weight.