I've done rebates before... 15 minutes of my time on about $120 in rebates (on less than $200 in merchandise before rebates.) This was on merchandise that I was going to purchase anyways, so I essentially made $480 an hour for the time spent. If you don't want rebates... then don't take them. But I have never in my life seen things discounted as deeply in sales as they are rebates. If they were, people would just buy several of the product and sell them off on ebay. (An address to actually mail the rebate to.)
If you really are that cynical, just take a look at the faces of the mass consumers... they smile a lot more than you. You know what? That means they are happier than you. If you think you're being funny, you're not. The tired cliche of making fun of american consumerism has been overdone like extra well done prime rib.
America is indeed a free country, and one of the freedoms is to buy and sell items in a way you see fit. If the terms that are being offered are acceptable to you, then you should have the freedom to take the terms. Otherwise, you don't have freedom.
You could always file online, and there's probably even a way to just drop them off yourself by hand. Remember that the USPS is not technically a government entity, so they really don't have a responsibility to send government business for free. Hell, the Fed probably pays postage to send you the tax forms.
I'd personally be all for limiting hardcore pornography to an.xxx domain. Hardcore pornography would be much easier to define, such as the acts of sex, oral sex, etc which show the genitals. Probably throw in things like spread labia and masturbation (male or female, although the latter would be sometimes difficult to define (whether someone is masturbating or simply covering their genitals could be difficult to determine from a still photo.) Of course, exceptions would be made for sites with medical and possibly educational uses.
Although it would probably make more sense to require a hardcorepornography tag (a more PC term would probably be created, but the concept is the same) in the HTML header. That would probably cover most situations, allowing for art sites/etc to show what some would deem explicit material without getting everything else filtered out. Most actual hardcore pornography sites (and a lot of the edgier artists) would wear the tag as a badge of honor. Something like this could be extended further into realizing that whole "semantic web" thing that people have been going on about for some time. The semantic web seems like it would be a whole lot more effective if done with metadata rather than direct parsing of data anyways.
While there was not necesarilly advertising for a company, you can bet artists were required to spread the good word of their patrons and benefactors in order to continue getting paid. Since there were no corporations per se, this is about as close to advertising as you can get (and many patrons were wealthy businessmen.) Maybe a Picaso (sic) wouldn't have a picture of someone eating a Wendy's burger, but you can bet that some had a placard which read "Commissioned by Gertrude Stein."
Many municipalities require police to respond to every 911 call, as a callback with a response of "I'm sorry, wrong number" could mean the phone was wrestled from the hands of the person living there. If a company were to do this, they'd get into big trouble.
According to Vonage, they have the capability it's just that the telephone companies that control the E911 services aren't holding up their end of the deal in some markets. My guess is it doesn't really matter much what hardware you have so much as where you live.
This outlook makes a lot more sense. Ignoring the extra burst from christmas spending, It's basically saying that companies usually make around 9% profit from all the investments they make throughout the year (investments including everything they pay for... labor, physical building, power, products to stock the shelves with, etc etc etc.) If you estimate December as having twice as much sales, this puts ROI up to about 9.5% which still sounds about right.
It's getting kinda repetetive hearing everybody complaining that Lego is destroying creativity by offering all these special sets. They still offer a big bucket of bricks at a reasonable price. In fact the big ol' bucket is one of their featured products, meaning they are trying to sell it. It's just that the consumer has mandated all these special little sets with their wallets. Slashdotters may have enjoyed building big complicated things out of simple parts, but most kids don't have the patience for that. For them they tried things like the Mindstorms line (I really assume that more adults played with this than kids.) They even offer lots of bricks by shape or by color if you come up with your own specific plan. If a set increases the companiy's profits, it will continue to be offered.
Duck Tape is one of the more common brands of duct tape. It's like calling facial tisue Kleenex. Besides, most building codes do not allow duct tape to be used on air ducts... you are supposed to use the really shiny silver stuff.
Yes, some amount of petroleum is currently used to make fertilizers for crops. However, Biodiesel and other biofuels need not be as fertilizer intensive: different crops can be grown for biofuels, and portions which are currently wastes in the food and other agricultural production process (stems of plants, husks, corncobs, used fryer grease, etc) can be used as feedstocks. Different methods of farming are continuously being investigated which reduce the dependance on fertilizers (crop rotation, mixed crop plantings, contour plowing for example.) Finally, alternate sources of fertilizers are available: food and animal (including human) wastes have been used as fertilizer as long as we have had agriculture. Refining the techniques can prove to be more efficient (and using manure and urine based fertilizers on fuel crops would be significantly less risky than using them on food crops.)
Although I'm not sure that fertilizers are the major use of petroleum in growing crops... the machinery (tractors, harvesters, transportation) currently use a significant amount of fuel. Improvements in engine efficiency would reduce this need though, and farm machinery would be an ideal first implementation of biodiesel: many large farm machines are already diesel, the source of production would be geographically near the location consumed, as well as providing the potential to reduce the risk of contaminating crops with petroleum based fuels.
But when you hear that more energy is put into creating biofuels than comes out, these studies are generally done with older agricultural and industrial techniques, and assume that the feedstocks are grown specifically for making biodiesel rather than using waste products.
Thankfully we have giant companies like Monsanto to back biodiesel. I imagine there would be less of a concern over genetically engineered crops if they are destined for a gas tank than if they are destined for the dinner table. There are still environmental concerns but they would be partially allayed by the potential reduction in dependance on petroleum. I imagine that some crops could be genetically engineered to output large amounts of oil with minimal fertilizer application, as low nitrate and phosphate content in the end product would be MORE desirable, rather than less desirable as it is in foodcrops. You basically want as pure hydrocarbon as you can, the extra nitrogen and phosphorous bearing compounds (primarilly proteins and ATP/ADP) would have to be refined out somewhat. Other chemicals which are supplemented in the soil would not be desirable in the final product, although they will be necessary for the support structures and biological machinery that actually produces the oils and carbohydrates which we turn into fuel.
The phrase "at no time in the last 650,000 years have levels of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane been as high as they are today" only means that the ice core that they analyzed only holds data up to 650,000 years ago. It's not that it was higher then, it's just that we have no actual data from before then, only conjecture.
I can see multiple cars actually being an environmental win. The truck for when you have to haul stuff around, the station wagon/minivan for when you have to haul people around and a subcompact for when you are commuting, running to the store for a small purchase, or... whatever. Now, this isn't including the environmental costs of building a car, and I don't know if a car causes environmental damage just sitting there (gasoline vapors? I know modern tanks are fairly well sealed.)
From what I understand, these things are probably not as environmentally friendly as you might think.
1)Wood is a renewable resource. There is more acreage of forest now than there was a century ago. This new acreage is comprised mainly of tree farms. about 99.9% or so of paper products come from tree farms. I'd be willing to bet that the same is true for purchased split firewood as it is for paper.
2)Except for aluminum and some precious metals, curbside recycling ends up using MORE energy than direct mining. Forest products often being the worst offender. What about the statistics quoted about recycling saving energy? That doesn't take into account the fuel needed to actually pick up the recyclables and sort them. Claims that the material would be picked up by the garbage trucks anyways don't take into account that garbage trucks usually end up returning partially empty. Further evidence that recycling is energy inefficient: recycled consumer goods (except for aluminum) cost much more than virgin products. This could be explained by economies of scale, except that the initial cost of collecting post-consumer recyclables is almost entirely subsidized through taxes in the community you live in. Aluminum is the only thing you'd actually be able to get money or by bringing it to the recycling plant, which is why you often see people going through the trash looking for aluminum cans.
3)Landfill space: The United States is not running out of landfill space. The total volume of active landfills in the US is about 1 square mile by 50 feet high. When people say that there are less and less landfills open, that doesn't take into account the fact that new ones opening are monster sized and do a good job of containing leachates. Not that cardboard and newspaper contain any toxic leachates anyways...
4)Landfilling forest products provides an effective carbon sink, reducing the total output of CO2 into the atmosphere.
5)These artificial logs, in addition to the gathering (petroleum intensive) and manufacturing (electricity intensive, so therefore petroleum intensive) have most likely been doped with paraffin, a petroleum product. Hmm, actually re-reading the comment is seems that they use cardboard which is already waxed, so this point actually isn't valid.
But still, using these recycled logs takes more energy, more intensive processing, "conserve" trees, a resource which is highly renewable these days, conserve landfill space, which really isn't at a premium, and actually end up putting MORE CO2 into the atmosphere than real logs. Not to mention that most firewood that I have seen used comes from on-property trees which had to be cut down for some reason or another. No shipping involved, very little fuel (chainsaws, possibly a cherry picker and some manual labor) involved. Maybe the recycled logs put out less soot, but besides that... I don't know.
Although, compressing your own paper and cardboard on site to burn may end up being an environmental win. As long as you aren't supplimenting a traditional heating system with this: the air drawn up the chimney by convection currents when a fire is burning will actually INCREASE your heating bill. Some modern chimneys have fixed this by exchanging much of the heat out of the chimney, so this can be solved through technology. But as entertainment, oftentimes a good fire can't be beat.
I'm proud to be distantly related to the man. Oh, and then there's his parrot.
Of course with all quotations and factoids of famous eccentric people, these may have to be taken with a grain of salt. Or several grains of salt on the rim of your glass...
People once looked into piping water from the Great Lakes to the high plains, as it was assumed that this would be a nice cheap source of water. Then the engineers stepped in and told the planners that it would take the construction of about 5-10 high yield power plants just to run the pumps to get the water there. And that's not even getting into the environmental problems pumping this much water around would cause, or the political problems this would cause (there are treaties between the U.S. and Canada that forbid pumping water out of the great lakes basin. Possible to get around this, but it would be very tricky.)
There is one problem with making water consumption plans municipality only, and that is basically rivers and lakes which are shared by municipalities. A city upstream can use so much water as to make it unusable or even unavailable downstream (notably the Colorado River which basically leaves the Baja Peninsula a trickle of brine after LA and Vegas take the lion's share. Baja communities which relied on the Colorado for water, fishing, etc have become devastated. The Sea of Cortez has been ecologically damaged by the increase of salt concentrations in the Colorado.) Although federal regulation does not really make sense either; water usage plans should be designed per watershed, although this is probably too big in some cases. A watershed as big as the Mississippi river basin or great lakes catchment would be too big to fairly manage; watershed management plans would often have to be broken down into sub-sheds for adequate planning.
I thought the point of this chip wasn't so much security, as there is no place to keep your money/credit cards in a skimpy thong. So they are trying to encourage skimpy thongs, which I would imagine would drum up more business.
The article is comparing microwave on-demand heating to resistive on-demand heating, not to traditional tank style water heaters. Since there is not a significant holding period in either, it is right to discard differences in radiative loss as insignificant.
Legionaires' disease seems to really only be a concern with people who are immuno-comprimised or who smoke. Turning the water up to 140f does increase the chance of scalding in young and elderly and increases the msineralization from pipes and solder (I.E. increased lead and possibly mercury in older houses.) Legionaires' seems to be contracted mainly through drinking water and other food-borne ways rather than aeresolization through showering, so not drinking or cooking with water from the hot water tap would decrease the chance if contamination. Rinsing dishes with cold water may also be advisable.
They will work for the lay man, because he will be simply installing firefox on Windows rather than Linux. Then he can directly launch RealPlayer or Windows Media Player (yes, these are not the best players, but they are the ones the lay man will have.)
"We will need your credit card # to continue this call." They have to make money somehow... this just means that no long distance charges are incured by the caller or the company. Although I'm sure the cost will be just wrapped up in the google advertising fee.
Google doesn't give the phone number to the advertiser. They delete your number after a short time. At least according to their privacy statement. Doing otherwise could open them up to litigation.
Slashdot Mirror
I've done rebates before... 15 minutes of my time on about $120 in rebates (on less than $200 in merchandise before rebates.) This was on merchandise that I was going to purchase anyways, so I essentially made $480 an hour for the time spent. If you don't want rebates... then don't take them. But I have never in my life seen things discounted as deeply in sales as they are rebates. If they were, people would just buy several of the product and sell them off on ebay. (An address to actually mail the rebate to.)
If you really are that cynical, just take a look at the faces of the mass consumers... they smile a lot more than you. You know what? That means they are happier than you. If you think you're being funny, you're not. The tired cliche of making fun of american consumerism has been overdone like extra well done prime rib.
America is indeed a free country, and one of the freedoms is to buy and sell items in a way you see fit. If the terms that are being offered are acceptable to you, then you should have the freedom to take the terms. Otherwise, you don't have freedom.
You could always file online, and there's probably even a way to just drop them off yourself by hand. Remember that the USPS is not technically a government entity, so they really don't have a responsibility to send government business for free. Hell, the Fed probably pays postage to send you the tax forms.
I'd personally be all for limiting hardcore pornography to an .xxx domain. Hardcore pornography would be much easier to define, such as the acts of sex, oral sex, etc which show the genitals. Probably throw in things like spread labia and masturbation (male or female, although the latter would be sometimes difficult to define (whether someone is masturbating or simply covering their genitals could be difficult to determine from a still photo.) Of course, exceptions would be made for sites with medical and possibly educational uses.
Although it would probably make more sense to require a hardcorepornography tag (a more PC term would probably be created, but the concept is the same) in the HTML header. That would probably cover most situations, allowing for art sites/etc to show what some would deem explicit material without getting everything else filtered out. Most actual hardcore pornography sites (and a lot of the edgier artists) would wear the tag as a badge of honor. Something like this could be extended further into realizing that whole "semantic web" thing that people have been going on about for some time. The semantic web seems like it would be a whole lot more effective if done with metadata rather than direct parsing of data anyways.
While there was not necesarilly advertising for a company, you can bet artists were required to spread the good word of their patrons and benefactors in order to continue getting paid. Since there were no corporations per se, this is about as close to advertising as you can get (and many patrons were wealthy businessmen.) Maybe a Picaso (sic) wouldn't have a picture of someone eating a Wendy's burger, but you can bet that some had a placard which read "Commissioned by Gertrude Stein."
Many municipalities require police to respond to every 911 call, as a callback with a response of "I'm sorry, wrong number" could mean the phone was wrestled from the hands of the person living there. If a company were to do this, they'd get into big trouble.
I don't know if stolen is exatly the right word. It's an old Public Enemy track. I think Duran Duran also covered it at some point in the mid 90's.
According to Vonage, they have the capability it's just that the telephone companies that control the E911 services aren't holding up their end of the deal in some markets. My guess is it doesn't really matter much what hardware you have so much as where you live.
This outlook makes a lot more sense. Ignoring the extra burst from christmas spending, It's basically saying that companies usually make around 9% profit from all the investments they make throughout the year (investments including everything they pay for... labor, physical building, power, products to stock the shelves with, etc etc etc.) If you estimate December as having twice as much sales, this puts ROI up to about 9.5% which still sounds about right.
It's getting kinda repetetive hearing everybody complaining that Lego is destroying creativity by offering all these special sets. They still offer a big bucket of bricks at a reasonable price. In fact the big ol' bucket is one of their featured products, meaning they are trying to sell it. It's just that the consumer has mandated all these special little sets with their wallets. Slashdotters may have enjoyed building big complicated things out of simple parts, but most kids don't have the patience for that. For them they tried things like the Mindstorms line (I really assume that more adults played with this than kids.) They even offer lots of bricks by shape or by color if you come up with your own specific plan. If a set increases the companiy's profits, it will continue to be offered.
Duck Tape is one of the more common brands of duct tape. It's like calling facial tisue Kleenex. Besides, most building codes do not allow duct tape to be used on air ducts... you are supposed to use the really shiny silver stuff.
Yes, some amount of petroleum is currently used to make fertilizers for crops. However, Biodiesel and other biofuels need not be as fertilizer intensive: different crops can be grown for biofuels, and portions which are currently wastes in the food and other agricultural production process (stems of plants, husks, corncobs, used fryer grease, etc) can be used as feedstocks. Different methods of farming are continuously being investigated which reduce the dependance on fertilizers (crop rotation, mixed crop plantings, contour plowing for example.) Finally, alternate sources of fertilizers are available: food and animal (including human) wastes have been used as fertilizer as long as we have had agriculture. Refining the techniques can prove to be more efficient (and using manure and urine based fertilizers on fuel crops would be significantly less risky than using them on food crops.)
Although I'm not sure that fertilizers are the major use of petroleum in growing crops... the machinery (tractors, harvesters, transportation) currently use a significant amount of fuel. Improvements in engine efficiency would reduce this need though, and farm machinery would be an ideal first implementation of biodiesel: many large farm machines are already diesel, the source of production would be geographically near the location consumed, as well as providing the potential to reduce the risk of contaminating crops with petroleum based fuels.
But when you hear that more energy is put into creating biofuels than comes out, these studies are generally done with older agricultural and industrial techniques, and assume that the feedstocks are grown specifically for making biodiesel rather than using waste products.
Thankfully we have giant companies like Monsanto to back biodiesel. I imagine there would be less of a concern over genetically engineered crops if they are destined for a gas tank than if they are destined for the dinner table. There are still environmental concerns but they would be partially allayed by the potential reduction in dependance on petroleum. I imagine that some crops could be genetically engineered to output large amounts of oil with minimal fertilizer application, as low nitrate and phosphate content in the end product would be MORE desirable, rather than less desirable as it is in foodcrops. You basically want as pure hydrocarbon as you can, the extra nitrogen and phosphorous bearing compounds (primarilly proteins and ATP/ADP) would have to be refined out somewhat. Other chemicals which are supplemented in the soil would not be desirable in the final product, although they will be necessary for the support structures and biological machinery that actually produces the oils and carbohydrates which we turn into fuel.
The phrase "at no time in the last 650,000 years have levels of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane been as high as they are today" only means that the ice core that they analyzed only holds data up to 650,000 years ago. It's not that it was higher then, it's just that we have no actual data from before then, only conjecture.
I can see multiple cars actually being an environmental win. The truck for when you have to haul stuff around, the station wagon/minivan for when you have to haul people around and a subcompact for when you are commuting, running to the store for a small purchase, or... whatever. Now, this isn't including the environmental costs of building a car, and I don't know if a car causes environmental damage just sitting there (gasoline vapors? I know modern tanks are fairly well sealed.)
From what I understand, these things are probably not as environmentally friendly as you might think.
1)Wood is a renewable resource. There is more acreage of forest now than there was a century ago. This new acreage is comprised mainly of tree farms. about 99.9% or so of paper products come from tree farms. I'd be willing to bet that the same is true for purchased split firewood as it is for paper.
2)Except for aluminum and some precious metals, curbside recycling ends up using MORE energy than direct mining. Forest products often being the worst offender. What about the statistics quoted about recycling saving energy? That doesn't take into account the fuel needed to actually pick up the recyclables and sort them. Claims that the material would be picked up by the garbage trucks anyways don't take into account that garbage trucks usually end up returning partially empty. Further evidence that recycling is energy inefficient: recycled consumer goods (except for aluminum) cost much more than virgin products. This could be explained by economies of scale, except that the initial cost of collecting post-consumer recyclables is almost entirely subsidized through taxes in the community you live in. Aluminum is the only thing you'd actually be able to get money or by bringing it to the recycling plant, which is why you often see people going through the trash looking for aluminum cans.
3)Landfill space: The United States is not running out of landfill space. The total volume of active landfills in the US is about 1 square mile by 50 feet high. When people say that there are less and less landfills open, that doesn't take into account the fact that new ones opening are monster sized and do a good job of containing leachates. Not that cardboard and newspaper contain any toxic leachates anyways...
4)Landfilling forest products provides an effective carbon sink, reducing the total output of CO2 into the atmosphere.
5)These artificial logs, in addition to the gathering (petroleum intensive) and manufacturing (electricity intensive, so therefore petroleum intensive) have most likely been doped with paraffin, a petroleum product. Hmm, actually re-reading the comment is seems that they use cardboard which is already waxed, so this point actually isn't valid.
But still, using these recycled logs takes more energy, more intensive processing, "conserve" trees, a resource which is highly renewable these days, conserve landfill space, which really isn't at a premium, and actually end up putting MORE CO2 into the atmosphere than real logs. Not to mention that most firewood that I have seen used comes from on-property trees which had to be cut down for some reason or another. No shipping involved, very little fuel (chainsaws, possibly a cherry picker and some manual labor) involved. Maybe the recycled logs put out less soot, but besides that... I don't know.
Although, compressing your own paper and cardboard on site to burn may end up being an environmental win. As long as you aren't supplimenting a traditional heating system with this: the air drawn up the chimney by convection currents when a fire is burning will actually INCREASE your heating bill. Some modern chimneys have fixed this by exchanging much of the heat out of the chimney, so this can be solved through technology. But as entertainment, oftentimes a good fire can't be beat.
When Winston Churchill was stumbling home from a bender, a lady stopped him and said "Sir, you are drunk." To which he responded Yes, Madam, I am drunk. But in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly.
I'm proud to be distantly related to the man. Oh, and then there's his parrot.
Of course with all quotations and factoids of famous eccentric people, these may have to be taken with a grain of salt. Or several grains of salt on the rim of your glass...
People once looked into piping water from the Great Lakes to the high plains, as it was assumed that this would be a nice cheap source of water. Then the engineers stepped in and told the planners that it would take the construction of about 5-10 high yield power plants just to run the pumps to get the water there. And that's not even getting into the environmental problems pumping this much water around would cause, or the political problems this would cause (there are treaties between the U.S. and Canada that forbid pumping water out of the great lakes basin. Possible to get around this, but it would be very tricky.)
There is one problem with making water consumption plans municipality only, and that is basically rivers and lakes which are shared by municipalities. A city upstream can use so much water as to make it unusable or even unavailable downstream (notably the Colorado River which basically leaves the Baja Peninsula a trickle of brine after LA and Vegas take the lion's share. Baja communities which relied on the Colorado for water, fishing, etc have become devastated. The Sea of Cortez has been ecologically damaged by the increase of salt concentrations in the Colorado.) Although federal regulation does not really make sense either; water usage plans should be designed per watershed, although this is probably too big in some cases. A watershed as big as the Mississippi river basin or great lakes catchment would be too big to fairly manage; watershed management plans would often have to be broken down into sub-sheds for adequate planning.
I thought the point of this chip wasn't so much security, as there is no place to keep your money/credit cards in a skimpy thong. So they are trying to encourage skimpy thongs, which I would imagine would drum up more business.
The article is comparing microwave on-demand heating to resistive on-demand heating, not to traditional tank style water heaters. Since there is not a significant holding period in either, it is right to discard differences in radiative loss as insignificant.
Legionaires' disease seems to really only be a concern with people who are immuno-comprimised or who smoke. Turning the water up to 140f does increase the chance of scalding in young and elderly and increases the msineralization from pipes and solder (I.E. increased lead and possibly mercury in older houses.) Legionaires' seems to be contracted mainly through drinking water and other food-borne ways rather than aeresolization through showering, so not drinking or cooking with water from the hot water tap would decrease the chance if contamination. Rinsing dishes with cold water may also be advisable.
So this seems to be about in line for tax return season?
They will work for the lay man, because he will be simply installing firefox on Windows rather than Linux. Then he can directly launch RealPlayer or Windows Media Player (yes, these are not the best players, but they are the ones the lay man will have.)
"We will need your credit card # to continue this call." They have to make money somehow... this just means that no long distance charges are incured by the caller or the company. Although I'm sure the cost will be just wrapped up in the google advertising fee.
Google doesn't give the phone number to the advertiser. They delete your number after a short time. At least according to their privacy statement. Doing otherwise could open them up to litigation.