Unfortunately most people blow it when they build their house and nearly all commercial home builders blow it too; orienting your house in the proper direction and building overhangs and windows to match one another so that you get sun in the winter and not in the summer is one of the most important steps.
I just built, and I oriented my house to the south and put a proper overhang in on half the windows (the rest are upstairs where I couldn't get a good overhang). After living there for a month now I find that the sunlight comes in just like it is supposed to. But it doesn't provide any heat.
You see, builders install this 'Low-E' glass in all the windows which blocks most of the heat that comes through normal glass. That's fine for those second floor windows, but I'm going to have to replace the glass in at least three windows and my front door to get any passive heating.
When you build, make sure you pick appropriate glass.
Since when is less than 200ms slow. Maybe you're thinking about bulbs from 7 years ago, but all my bulbs (ranging in age from 2001 to recently, since a few of my circa-2001 bulbs did finally burn out) start up instantly
Depends on the bulb. I just bought 2 dozen CF bulbs at Wal-Mart and they take around 3/4 of a second to start up. It's long enough that you wonder if you accidently flipped the wrong switch every time you turn on the light.
Yes, you can get much better bulbs (both in color and turn on time). They cost more.
There are two designs for a dimmer. One is just a variable resistor, which reduces the voltage by just burning the power the light would have used. The other clips the voltage at the specified point (IIRC, it's a triac), so instead of having a nice sine wave, you have this weird truncated thing.
You'll also run into autotransformer dimmers, typically in older installations.
That depends very much on the bulb and the sensitivity of the viewer. I bought a couple dozen inexpensive CF bulbs recently and they look terrible, skin looks sickly green under them and the wood floors look ugly.
Before you spend lots of money on bulbs, buy a few different brands and colors to trial in various locations in your home to see what you like best.
I picked up some of those 6k color bulbs the other day. I installed four of them in the hallway in my house and now it feels like I've got skylights in there. It took a little getting used to, and the wood floor looks a little odd (the colors are washed out and a gray compared to incandescent or real sunlight), but all things considered its much better than the warm CF's.
I bought a couple of dozen more bulbs after that but they all turned out to be the 'warm' color. Everybody looks sickly green under them, and the floor looks like crap. I may have to move them to the basement soon.
Dimmable compact fluorescent bulbs cannot be dimmed by a triac chopper of the sort found in most home automation hardware (X10), they can only be dimmed using a variac style dimmer (typically a knob on the wall that adjust an autotransformer).
I haven't run into any X10 variac type dimmers, and if I did find one I'd expect the price to be outrageous.
I checked into the cost of a 'geothermal' heat pump system for my new house (construction completed in November). For anyone who isn't familiar with these, its just a regular heat pump that uses water in a network of PVC pipes buried in the yard as its sink/source instead of a big fan unit. Up here in the north (Nebraska) this makes a heat pump much more effective in the winter since it can extract heat from the dirt at about 55F instead of from the air which might be 20F.
The cost to upgrade from the standard system, a 3 ton AC unit and natural gas heater, was $15,000. Since I don't raise the heat above 64F in the winter or lower it below 79F in the summer the pay-off time for that upgrade was too long to be worthwhile. That $15,000 would easily pay for 30 years worth of winter gas usage, not including interest.
Just out of curosity, what sort of mineral resources could be brought back from space at a profit?
Energy resources are an obvious one, solar or hydrocarbon (like we need to go dragging down more stuff to burn here), and maybe helium for fusion (provided that ever happens) or uranium.
But for the most part it seems that the cost of locating and moving materials back to Earth in the sort of timeframe that human investors are interested in is cost prohibitive. It might be possible to bring the cost way down by using minimum energy orbital transfers to get stuff back to Earth, but with delivery times on the order of several to many decades it would take an organization with the capacity to make a very large, very long-term investment to set up. Since investors are usually looking for a payoff in their own lifetime that is difficult to imagine.
I guess what we need are the medical advancments to make the super-rich extremely long-lived so that they can plan for such long term investments. We could build a culture of conservation and planning too, but that'll never happen.
Enough groceries for a month will easily fit into even a subcompact.
That depends on how many of those 4 kids + 1 driver are going with you to the store and how many of the kids are in car seats. Of course, many couples can have the spouse watch the kids in the evening and go to the store without kids. A vehicle with larger capacity provides more flexibility.
You can also fit about 4 kids + 1 driver into that same subcompact fairly easily.
Again, that depends on the ages. You'd have a hard time fitting more than two kids in car seats into the back seat of a compact car, and that third one would not be safe (in a wreck he'd be crammed up between the sharp bits of the seats). With bigger kids, while you might be able to fit them, that doesn't necessarily mean you'd want to fit them for more than a short drive. They'd be more comfortable in a large vehicle.
I doubt many families rich enough to afford a minivan have 5 or more kids.
Minivans are quite cheap. Their popularity over the past decade means that the used market is flush with them. I picked up a '96 Town-n-Country in great shape for $6000. There were plenty of other choices ranging from $2000 to $10,000 on the lots where I looked.
It has been the most versitile vehicle I've owned, I'd hate to be without one now. Previously I had a Geo Prizm and a '71 Impala (still have them both, both were given to me free of charge). I installed 4 seat belts in the rear seat of the Impala, but even a rolling living room like that can only reasonably carry 6 passengers for any duration (Although you can fit a full sized spare, subwoofer and two large grocery carts worth of stuff into the trunk all at the same time as well). You can put a child seat in the middle of the front to fit in all 7 people, but it's not comfortable and certainly not safe.
Primary drawback of the minivan is its gas mileage. It typically gets 17 MPG which is significantly better than the Impala (which hovers around 10, plus a half quart of oil per 1000 miles). This is lower than most minivans but typical of the TnC. Sometimes it'll spike up to 23 for awhile before dropping back to 17. I think its some kind of design flaw in that model.
Anyway, yes, you can 'get by' with a large family and one or two small cars, but minivan is inexpensive and vastly more practical.
Like global warming it's an argument taking away from the real issues. With a bit of attention and care with most resources we can do just fine. We are simply not respecting our general environment.
I think that you are correct that there are technological ways out of these problems (global warming, peak oil, etc). This is not a technological problem. It is a social problem. The question is are we actually headed down a path that will leverage the technological solutions to the problem? If not, is it still possible to get people to head that direction?
In the current social climate, is it possible to get from where we are to where we need to be?
My main point is that there is no "doomsday" where prices suddenly spike out of control because OIL IS GONE (OMG!). It'll be a gradual raising of prices, necessitating a gradual switch to other things in various industries.
The peak oil doomers are suggesting that because of our deep dependence on oil that the switch to other energy sources will be very expensive and slow. If we wait until the price of oil starts rising because production has reached a peak/platue then those costs will rise even more. At some point we will not be able to afford the cost of switching.
While we have other energy technologies available we don't really have anything available to replace the huge volume of transportation fuels we need to support the current ways of doing things. We are toying with ethanol, hydrogen and electric powered vehicles, but the cost of replacing the existing transportation fleet in the US with these as-yet immature technologies is enormous and will take on the order of 10-20 years. In addition to replacing them we have to figure out where the power for them comes from. The power from ethanol is currently supported by oil (fossil-diesel to power tractors and natural gas to fertalize the fields to grow the grain), hydrogen is usually seperated from oil or natural gas or requires enormous energy input to seperate from water, and electrical power for an electric car fleet requires a very large increase in consumption of coal and investment in building out the power grid to support the increase in demand.
I think that technologically we have the ability switch away from fossil fuels without an economic crash, but it will require a strong and sustained effort that will be difficult to engineer from a social standpoint. It's not that we lack the technology or ability, it's that we lack the will.
By the way, when America owes China additional trillions of dollars, what are the Americans going to do for money to buy the oil that China is wanting to buy for themselves
"When you owe the bank $200,000 you should worry. When you owe the bank $200,000,000 the bank should worry."/Tongue-in-cheek
Thanks for your detailed post, it's always good to hear the real dope from you guys who are actually doing the work.
Our country (the USA) has gone from sustinance living to superpower in the last 500 years. Why have parts of the rest of the world stagnated so?
This is probably one of those areas where humanity simply hasn't developed the science to know how to answer that question. I suspect that much of the answer depends on psycology, a science that is currently about as advanced as astrology (not because psycologist are stupid but because it's a very difficult subject in which to develop theories on which real-world solutions can be built).
For now national success is an art and the result depends very much on the materials the artist has to work with. The USA was a large, fertile and (mostly) blank canvas that inspired a great many fine artists to create a great (by some measures) nation. Had those same people been faced with a land already full of corrupt warlords, bad land managment and starving people I'm sure the result would have been much different.
I DVR everything, and watch absolutely nothing live. During a typical week I'll watch Sci-Fi networks friday lineup if they are first-run (Battlestar, Stargates), and episode or two of 'How it's Made', that generally while I'm doing something else (modeling, research on the computer, etc). My wife watches ER, Grey's Anatomy and Boston Legal, and I'm generally at least within ear-shot and occasionally watching those, so I'll count them too. We also get M*A*S*H re-runs for 2 hours a day, which we have on in the background before bed. We've both seen them all so many times over the years that we don't really watch them, except for the best parts.
So, altogether I'd estimate that while the networks are airing new stuff I watch something on the order of 7-10 hours a week, but that about 4 hours of that is 'background' viewing, where I'm actively engaged in another task while following the story. When new material is not airing the 3 hours of exclusive viewing behavior (where I'm 100% engaged in the episode and will pause or rewind the video to handle interrupts) drops to perhaps an hour a week (various specials, history channel, etc).
Most of the non-Sci-Fi network material is edu-tainment programming such as History or Science channel material (I enjoy watching with the laptop so I can look up more detail about various facts on the web).
Well, my kid watched videos all the damn time when he was under 3, and he's no more autistic than I am (we both exibit mild ADD, but my home didn't even have a TV until I was 4, and no VCR until I was about 15).
Just goes to show you that it's a complex disorder that likely has a number of contributing factors.
If hibernate under Windows wasn't broken with large amounts of ram I'd use it.
As it is, if you have more than about a gig or so of ram (I have 2gb) you can't hibernate if you have more than a couple of trivial applications running, it'll give you an 'insufficent system resources' or some such message, then completely disable hibernate mode until you reboot. Then if you suspend it (at least with my Dell 700m) instead it randomly wakes up (maybe to hibernate) then stays on, runs the battery flat and dies.
Hibernate definately takes longer than 5 seconds to come back. It's faster than a cold start, but not by much. Not that I mind waiting for startup, generally I'm more concerned about shutdown, because I can't trust the damn thing to actually hibernate, I have to sit there and wait for it do its thing (or not).
I'm almost to the point where I install a clean, fast-booting windows system, then install nothing but VirtualPC and put all my apps in that. At least then I can suspend the VM and reboot the host without having to shutdown all my apps. I wonder if linux would make a decent host OS for a virtual windows machine. Maybe with VMWare.. hmm..
You can build 'bumpers' on objects to protect from debris (rather easily too it turns out)
It might not be hard to add protection, but you have to have done it before launch. Going up to retrofit protection would be a big deal. Also, protection is heavy and/or expensive to stop anything bigger than paint flecks (which can do considerable damage by themselves).
or you can just maneuver your object out of the way of the debris.
The resources to track and avoid a deliberate shrapnel attack would be ridiculous and most likely impossible. Like trying to run through a hailstorm.
Remember that the size of space is vast, so the amount of mass you'd have to put into orbit to guarentee a hit is huge.
I haven't done the analysis, but it seems to me that even one orbiting bomb designed to create killer junk would make for huge headaches for anyone who didn't want their stuff to be sandblasted to death. Consider how much damage the unintentional junk does already, and thats just the stuff we accidentally left there.
So, yes, the orbits that we use cover a vast area, but it only takes a very tiny amount of mass to do serious damage. How much area can you cover with a few billion grains of sand disbursed by explosives?
You're better off trying to hit the object with a direct intercept
Certainly if you know exactly where your target is it's better to shoot directly at it. If you don't know exactly where it is, but have a pretty good idea of what orbits it might occupy you might take a shotgun approach and fill likely orbits with high-speed crap, effectively shooting at it constantly.
At the very least it is a deterent weapon, like ICBM delivered nukes. Attacking someone who has one is a dumb idea because even if it doesn't block your attack, it makes things much worse for everybody.
Anyway, I wonder if I can find an analysis of this type of weapon somewhere..
Because not two months ago, he wanted to shut down the ISS missions because they were estimated to cost $200M.
Isn't that like one tenth of what we blow on a war... weekly?
Another way of saying this is that we spend a billion bucks a week securing exclusive access to the second largest oil reserve on the planet at a time when many experts believe that world capacity to consume oil will very soon exceed world capacity to produce oil.
Oil that lets us power an economy that can launch space missions.
Of course BP, Exxon et. al. assure us that there is plenty of oil, no need to worry about that.
The US has a history of promsing NK things and then switching presidents and not delivering. In NK's position I'd tell the US to go fark itself too.
I'm not sure what game NK is playing though, having a few small nuclear bombs and a reputation as a crazy bastard seems to me like a good way to get people thinking about preemptive action. I think in NK's position I'd set up an insular foreign policy and see about building something a bit like Cuba.
Out of curiosity. If the US were to put up orbiting nuclear weapons, whats to stop China (or anyone with launch capacity) from putting up lots of simple orbiting shrapnel bombs ready to spew forth sufficent high-speed trash to destroy anything in a reasonable orbit?
You'd hate to use something like that because it would deny space access to everybody for a long time, but thats better than getting nuked from orbit, particularly if you've already prepared your infrastructure for the effects of deploying such a weapon.
Well, although it is mind-bogglingly improbable, the little rat probably would have hyperventilated and emptied his lungs just before going out the air lock and then been picked up by a little starship (although it would have to be somewhat larger that what a small dog could swallow). So they wouldn't have gotten any results from that experiment anyway. Perhaps they could use a whale instead.
The fix for me is to place the screen as far back as possible, leaving room for my elbows at the edge of the table with my forearms resting on the table. My LCD has also really helped with table real estate with respects to this.
That's what I do too. Dual LCDs pushed back as far into the corner as I can get them, microsoft natural keyboard a bit over a foot from the edge of the desk. I adjust the back part of my chair to allow an extreme recline (45 or 50 degree angle from horizontal), then roll up to the desk until the lower edge of my chest touches the desk. This puts the LCD's a bit farther away than arm's length and centered just a little above eye level.
Its a very comfortable, very relaxed position. The only problems are that it puts that bony point on the side of one's elbow right against the desk, and it requires some sholder effort to switch to a right-handed mouse (numeric keypad location forces mouse to be pretty far to the right. Makes me wish I moused left handed).
True, it is possible someone could bring their own tamper-evident tape and memory card with the appropriate digital signature for that particular machine into the booth with them, but then what would they do with it? Download the votes from the machine? That wouldn't be very useful for skewing election results.
Only an idiot (like whomever makes the decisions at Diebold) would allow software updates via the external card slot, so obviously the attacker wouldn't be uploading any hacked software to our secure machine.
The best place to attack the results would be after the results are downloaded from the machines. An election official could determine the private key on each voting machine (the private key of the key pair generated and written to each unique machine by the certification authority) then make new memory cards for each machine, signing them with the appropriate stolen private key before passing the memory cards on to whomever tallies the results.
Any system will have holes, but the point is that physical security on the machine to protect it from voters is easy. protecting the machine from election officials isn't that much harder. Providing transparency so people can see that no fraud is occuring is more difficult, particularly if there aren't very many people who care enough to go out of their way to look.
Studies show that birthrates for a nation track industrialization. Farmers have lots of kids pretty much everywhere. Officer and factor workers don't (partially due to the differences in the role women play in the different societies). The birthrates of most nations that are not industrialized now but are headed that direction are slowing, more or less on track with the historical trends of currently industrialized nations. With some assumptions it can be estimated that world population will top out around 9 billion people sometime in the late 21st century. There are many variables of course.
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Unfortunately most people blow it when they build their house and nearly all commercial home builders blow it too; orienting your house in the proper direction and building overhangs and windows to match one another so that you get sun in the winter and not in the summer is one of the most important steps.
I just built, and I oriented my house to the south and put a proper overhang in on half the windows (the rest are upstairs where I couldn't get a good overhang). After living there for a month now I find that the sunlight comes in just like it is supposed to. But it doesn't provide any heat.
You see, builders install this 'Low-E' glass in all the windows which blocks most of the heat that comes through normal glass. That's fine for those second floor windows, but I'm going to have to replace the glass in at least three windows and my front door to get any passive heating.
When you build, make sure you pick appropriate glass.
low startup time?
Since when is less than 200ms slow. Maybe you're thinking about bulbs from 7 years ago, but all my bulbs (ranging in age from 2001 to recently, since a few of my circa-2001 bulbs did finally burn out) start up instantly
Depends on the bulb. I just bought 2 dozen CF bulbs at Wal-Mart and they take around 3/4 of a second to start up. It's long enough that you wonder if you accidently flipped the wrong switch every time you turn on the light.
Yes, you can get much better bulbs (both in color and turn on time). They cost more.
There are two designs for a dimmer. One is just a variable resistor, which reduces the voltage by just burning the power the light would have used. The other clips the voltage at the specified point (IIRC, it's a triac), so instead of having a nice sine wave, you have this weird truncated thing.
You'll also run into autotransformer dimmers, typically in older installations.
Compact fluorescents do not "look awful"
That depends very much on the bulb and the sensitivity of the viewer. I bought a couple dozen inexpensive CF bulbs recently and they look terrible, skin looks sickly green under them and the wood floors look ugly.
Before you spend lots of money on bulbs, buy a few different brands and colors to trial in various locations in your home to see what you like best.
I picked up some of those 6k color bulbs the other day. I installed four of them in the hallway in my house and now it feels like I've got skylights in there. It took a little getting used to, and the wood floor looks a little odd (the colors are washed out and a gray compared to incandescent or real sunlight), but all things considered its much better than the warm CF's.
I bought a couple of dozen more bulbs after that but they all turned out to be the 'warm' color. Everybody looks sickly green under them, and the floor looks like crap. I may have to move them to the basement soon.
Dimmable compact fluorescent bulbs cannot be dimmed by a triac chopper of the sort found in most home automation hardware (X10), they can only be dimmed using a variac style dimmer (typically a knob on the wall that adjust an autotransformer).
I haven't run into any X10 variac type dimmers, and if I did find one I'd expect the price to be outrageous.
I checked into the cost of a 'geothermal' heat pump system for my new house (construction completed in November). For anyone who isn't familiar with these, its just a regular heat pump that uses water in a network of PVC pipes buried in the yard as its sink/source instead of a big fan unit. Up here in the north (Nebraska) this makes a heat pump much more effective in the winter since it can extract heat from the dirt at about 55F instead of from the air which might be 20F.
The cost to upgrade from the standard system, a 3 ton AC unit and natural gas heater, was $15,000. Since I don't raise the heat above 64F in the winter or lower it below 79F in the summer the pay-off time for that upgrade was too long to be worthwhile. That $15,000 would easily pay for 30 years worth of winter gas usage, not including interest.
Just out of curosity, what sort of mineral resources could be brought back from space at a profit?
Energy resources are an obvious one, solar or hydrocarbon (like we need to go dragging down more stuff to burn here), and maybe helium for fusion (provided that ever happens) or uranium.
But for the most part it seems that the cost of locating and moving materials back to Earth in the sort of timeframe that human investors are interested in is cost prohibitive. It might be possible to bring the cost way down by using minimum energy orbital transfers to get stuff back to Earth, but with delivery times on the order of several to many decades it would take an organization with the capacity to make a very large, very long-term investment to set up. Since investors are usually looking for a payoff in their own lifetime that is difficult to imagine.
I guess what we need are the medical advancments to make the super-rich extremely long-lived so that they can plan for such long term investments. We could build a culture of conservation and planning too, but that'll never happen.
fnord
Enough groceries for a month will easily fit into even a subcompact.
That depends on how many of those 4 kids + 1 driver are going with you to the store and how many of the kids are in car seats. Of course, many couples can have the spouse watch the kids in the evening and go to the store without kids. A vehicle with larger capacity provides more flexibility.
You can also fit about 4 kids + 1 driver into that same subcompact fairly easily.
Again, that depends on the ages. You'd have a hard time fitting more than two kids in car seats into the back seat of a compact car, and that third one would not be safe (in a wreck he'd be crammed up between the sharp bits of the seats). With bigger kids, while you might be able to fit them, that doesn't necessarily mean you'd want to fit them for more than a short drive. They'd be more comfortable in a large vehicle.
I doubt many families rich enough to afford a minivan have 5 or more kids.
Minivans are quite cheap. Their popularity over the past decade means that the used market is flush with them. I picked up a '96 Town-n-Country in great shape for $6000. There were plenty of other choices ranging from $2000 to $10,000 on the lots where I looked.
It has been the most versitile vehicle I've owned, I'd hate to be without one now. Previously I had a Geo Prizm and a '71 Impala (still have them both, both were given to me free of charge). I installed 4 seat belts in the rear seat of the Impala, but even a rolling living room like that can only reasonably carry 6 passengers for any duration (Although you can fit a full sized spare, subwoofer and two large grocery carts worth of stuff into the trunk all at the same time as well). You can put a child seat in the middle of the front to fit in all 7 people, but it's not comfortable and certainly not safe.
Primary drawback of the minivan is its gas mileage. It typically gets 17 MPG which is significantly better than the Impala (which hovers around 10, plus a half quart of oil per 1000 miles). This is lower than most minivans but typical of the TnC. Sometimes it'll spike up to 23 for awhile before dropping back to 17. I think its some kind of design flaw in that model.
Anyway, yes, you can 'get by' with a large family and one or two small cars, but minivan is inexpensive and vastly more practical.
Like global warming it's an argument taking away from the real issues. With a bit of attention and care with most resources we can do just fine. We are simply not respecting our general environment.
I think that you are correct that there are technological ways out of these problems (global warming, peak oil, etc). This is not a technological problem. It is a social problem. The question is are we actually headed down a path that will leverage the technological solutions to the problem? If not, is it still possible to get people to head that direction?
In the current social climate, is it possible to get from where we are to where we need to be?
My main point is that there is no "doomsday" where prices suddenly spike out of control because OIL IS GONE (OMG!). It'll be a gradual raising of prices, necessitating a gradual switch to other things in various industries.
The peak oil doomers are suggesting that because of our deep dependence on oil that the switch to other energy sources will be very expensive and slow. If we wait until the price of oil starts rising because production has reached a peak/platue then those costs will rise even more. At some point we will not be able to afford the cost of switching.
While we have other energy technologies available we don't really have anything available to replace the huge volume of transportation fuels we need to support the current ways of doing things. We are toying with ethanol, hydrogen and electric powered vehicles, but the cost of replacing the existing transportation fleet in the US with these as-yet immature technologies is enormous and will take on the order of 10-20 years. In addition to replacing them we have to figure out where the power for them comes from. The power from ethanol is currently supported by oil (fossil-diesel to power tractors and natural gas to fertalize the fields to grow the grain), hydrogen is usually seperated from oil or natural gas or requires enormous energy input to seperate from water, and electrical power for an electric car fleet requires a very large increase in consumption of coal and investment in building out the power grid to support the increase in demand.
I think that technologically we have the ability switch away from fossil fuels without an economic crash, but it will require a strong and sustained effort that will be difficult to engineer from a social standpoint. It's not that we lack the technology or ability, it's that we lack the will.
By the way, when America owes China additional trillions of dollars, what are the Americans going to do for money to buy the oil that China is wanting to buy for themselves
/Tongue-in-cheek
"When you owe the bank $200,000 you should worry. When you owe the bank $200,000,000 the bank should worry."
Thanks for your detailed post, it's always good to hear the real dope from you guys who are actually doing the work.
Our country (the USA) has gone from sustinance living to superpower in the last 500 years. Why have parts of the rest of the world stagnated so?
This is probably one of those areas where humanity simply hasn't developed the science to know how to answer that question. I suspect that much of the answer depends on psycology, a science that is currently about as advanced as astrology (not because psycologist are stupid but because it's a very difficult subject in which to develop theories on which real-world solutions can be built).
For now national success is an art and the result depends very much on the materials the artist has to work with. The USA was a large, fertile and (mostly) blank canvas that inspired a great many fine artists to create a great (by some measures) nation. Had those same people been faced with a land already full of corrupt warlords, bad land managment and starving people I'm sure the result would have been much different.
I DVR everything, and watch absolutely nothing live.
During a typical week I'll watch Sci-Fi networks friday lineup if they are first-run (Battlestar, Stargates), and episode or two of 'How it's Made', that generally while I'm doing something else (modeling, research on the computer, etc). My wife watches ER, Grey's Anatomy and Boston Legal, and I'm generally at least within ear-shot and occasionally watching those, so I'll count them too. We also get M*A*S*H re-runs for 2 hours a day, which we have on in the background before bed. We've both seen them all so many times over the years that we don't really watch them, except for the best parts.
So, altogether I'd estimate that while the networks are airing new stuff I watch something on the order of 7-10 hours a week, but that about 4 hours of that is 'background' viewing, where I'm actively engaged in another task while following the story. When new material is not airing the 3 hours of exclusive viewing behavior (where I'm 100% engaged in the episode and will pause or rewind the video to handle interrupts) drops to perhaps an hour a week (various specials, history channel, etc).
Most of the non-Sci-Fi network material is edu-tainment programming such as History or Science channel material (I enjoy watching with the laptop so I can look up more detail about various facts on the web).
Well, my kid watched videos all the damn time when he was under 3, and he's no more autistic than I am (we both exibit mild ADD, but my home didn't even have a TV until I was 4, and no VCR until I was about 15).
Just goes to show you that it's a complex disorder that likely has a number of contributing factors.
If hibernate under Windows wasn't broken with large amounts of ram I'd use it.
As it is, if you have more than about a gig or so of ram (I have 2gb) you can't hibernate if you have more than a couple of trivial applications running, it'll give you an 'insufficent system resources' or some such message, then completely disable hibernate mode until you reboot. Then if you suspend it (at least with my Dell 700m) instead it randomly wakes up (maybe to hibernate) then stays on, runs the battery flat and dies.
Hibernate definately takes longer than 5 seconds to come back. It's faster than a cold start, but not by much. Not that I mind waiting for startup, generally I'm more concerned about shutdown, because I can't trust the damn thing to actually hibernate, I have to sit there and wait for it do its thing (or not).
I'm almost to the point where I install a clean, fast-booting windows system, then install nothing but VirtualPC and put all my apps in that. At least then I can suspend the VM and reboot the host without having to shutdown all my apps. I wonder if linux would make a decent host OS for a virtual windows machine. Maybe with VMWare.. hmm..
You can build 'bumpers' on objects to protect from debris (rather easily too it turns out)
It might not be hard to add protection, but you have to have done it before launch. Going up to retrofit protection would be a big deal. Also, protection is heavy and/or expensive to stop anything bigger than paint flecks (which can do considerable damage by themselves).
or you can just maneuver your object out of the way of the debris.
The resources to track and avoid a deliberate shrapnel attack would be ridiculous and most likely impossible. Like trying to run through a hailstorm.
Remember that the size of space is vast, so the amount of mass you'd have to put into orbit to guarentee a hit is huge.
I haven't done the analysis, but it seems to me that even one orbiting bomb designed to create killer junk would make for huge headaches for anyone who didn't want their stuff to be sandblasted to death. Consider how much damage the unintentional junk does already, and thats just the stuff we accidentally left there.
So, yes, the orbits that we use cover a vast area, but it only takes a very tiny amount of mass to do serious damage. How much area can you cover with a few billion grains of sand disbursed by explosives?
You're better off trying to hit the object with a direct intercept
Certainly if you know exactly where your target is it's better to shoot directly at it. If you don't know exactly where it is, but have a pretty good idea of what orbits it might occupy you might take a shotgun approach and fill likely orbits with high-speed crap, effectively shooting at it constantly.
At the very least it is a deterent weapon, like ICBM delivered nukes. Attacking someone who has one is a dumb idea because even if it doesn't block your attack, it makes things much worse for everybody.
Anyway, I wonder if I can find an analysis of this type of weapon somewhere..
Because not two months ago, he wanted to shut down the ISS missions because they were estimated to cost $200M.
... weekly?
Isn't that like one tenth of what we blow on a war
Another way of saying this is that we spend a billion bucks a week securing exclusive access to the second largest oil reserve on the planet at a time when many experts believe that world capacity to consume oil will very soon exceed world capacity to produce oil.
Oil that lets us power an economy that can launch space missions.
Of course BP, Exxon et. al. assure us that there is plenty of oil, no need to worry about that.
The US has a history of promsing NK things and then switching presidents and not delivering. In NK's position I'd tell the US to go fark itself too.
I'm not sure what game NK is playing though, having a few small nuclear bombs and a reputation as a crazy bastard seems to me like a good way to get people thinking about preemptive action. I think in NK's position I'd set up an insular foreign policy and see about building something a bit like Cuba.
Out of curiosity. If the US were to put up orbiting nuclear weapons, whats to stop China (or anyone with launch capacity) from putting up lots of simple orbiting shrapnel bombs ready to spew forth sufficent high-speed trash to destroy anything in a reasonable orbit?
You'd hate to use something like that because it would deny space access to everybody for a long time, but thats better than getting nuked from orbit, particularly if you've already prepared your infrastructure for the effects of deploying such a weapon.
Well, although it is mind-bogglingly improbable, the little rat probably would have hyperventilated and emptied his lungs just before going out the air lock and then been picked up by a little starship (although it would have to be somewhat larger that what a small dog could swallow). So they wouldn't have gotten any results from that experiment anyway. Perhaps they could use a whale instead.
Hey dont forget the magnet field caused by those 10550 amps, I wonder what this would do to someone with a pacemaker nearby?
It would probably be something like that scene in the old Dune movie.
The fix for me is to place the screen as far back as possible, leaving room for my elbows at the edge of the table with my forearms resting on the table. My LCD has also really helped with table real estate with respects to this.
That's what I do too. Dual LCDs pushed back as far into the corner as I can get them, microsoft natural keyboard a bit over a foot from the edge of the desk. I adjust the back part of my chair to allow an extreme recline (45 or 50 degree angle from horizontal), then roll up to the desk until the lower edge of my chest touches the desk. This puts the LCD's a bit farther away than arm's length and centered just a little above eye level.
Its a very comfortable, very relaxed position. The only problems are that it puts that bony point on the side of one's elbow right against the desk, and it requires some sholder effort to switch to a right-handed mouse (numeric keypad location forces mouse to be pretty far to the right. Makes me wish I moused left handed).
True, it is possible someone could bring their own tamper-evident tape and memory card with the appropriate digital signature for that particular machine into the booth with them, but then what would they do with it? Download the votes from the machine? That wouldn't be very useful for skewing election results.
Only an idiot (like whomever makes the decisions at Diebold) would allow software updates via the external card slot, so obviously the attacker wouldn't be uploading any hacked software to our secure machine.
The best place to attack the results would be after the results are downloaded from the machines. An election official could determine the private key on each voting machine (the private key of the key pair generated and written to each unique machine by the certification authority) then make new memory cards for each machine, signing them with the appropriate stolen private key before passing the memory cards on to whomever tallies the results.
Any system will have holes, but the point is that physical security on the machine to protect it from voters is easy. protecting the machine from election officials isn't that much harder. Providing transparency so people can see that no fraud is occuring is more difficult, particularly if there aren't very many people who care enough to go out of their way to look.
Studies show that birthrates for a nation track industrialization. Farmers have lots of kids pretty much everywhere. Officer and factor workers don't (partially due to the differences in the role women play in the different societies). The birthrates of most nations that are not industrialized now but are headed that direction are slowing, more or less on track with the historical trends of currently industrialized nations. With some assumptions it can be estimated that world population will top out around 9 billion people sometime in the late 21st century. There are many variables of course.
New Scientist article