This is for "electronics retailers" which I assume means Best Buy and Circuit City. I wouldn't worry* about being ripped off if you get your PC from them rather than rolling your own. But what I really think this means is that A)laptops are hard (impossible?) to assemble yourself from off the shelf/internet ordered components while it is easy (almost trivial to anyone familiar with computer hardware) to make a desktop.
(* The reason not to worry about it is because you can allready assume that you are getting ripped off.)
It affects the interstate market for nannies, as well as the nanny's demand for interstate commerce, and thus constitutes interstate commerce.
More importantly, the records collection agency that you got the info on your nanny from is likely interstate (if not in their customer base, then at the very least in their information base.) That could easilly provide grounds for putting any information collected under the jurisdiction of interstate commerce. So just shred your nannie's credit report. Now it's probably the law, in addition to just being plain ethical.
Paper will decompose under the proper conditions. A landfill is pretty much completely oxygen free with no source of water (landfills are capped to prevent water from leaching toxic chemicals out) meaning that they biological processes which break paper down no longer function. Newspapers discarded over 40 years before have been out of landfills which were still readable. more info. Considering that after compaction paper historically took up about half of the space in a landfill, this is actually a big deal.
If anything, though, I'd see this act reducing the amount of paper going into landfills. It would mean that people think twice before throwing a piece of paper in the regular garbage. Recycling would be a more sure bet of actually destroying the paper in such a way that it is rendered un-reassemblable than throwing in a landfill.
If they are only offering a 2 hour game, then it had better be 1/70th the price of a 140 minute game (assuming similar replayability.) Okay, maybe even 1/7th of the price would be appropriate. Hmm... a series of $10 episodes of a very high quality video game? Might that actually take off? Video rental places would either make a killing off of it or suffer dramatically, depending on if they marketed them the same as regular games.
I think the industry would end up losing out if it went to this. Basically a group of friends could get together and split the costs. On second thoughts, people trade video games all the time. It was a right of passage as a teenager/preteen. This could even work to disuade piracy in a "It's not my time to hack this $10 little game" way.
And then after a while, just release the whole thing as one giant box set with a couple of bonus features. Could probably charge more for that than for a single game, but volume just wouldn't be that high. However this would be after development costs are pretty much paid off anyways.
I don't know... I'm not a video game developer. And the ones I know would probably just laugh at the idea.
Before life came about, the Earth was most likely regolith. If you got life to live long and reproduce for long enough, Mars would eventually have soil. Probably far different than our soil due to the massive differences in atmospheric and hydraulic profiles, but something would come about.
That really wouldn't be that strange. I imagine it would be the end goal of sending us here in the first place. Along the lines of panspermy, but on a more local level.
2) Since Titan is further away from the sun, it experiences less solar pressure. Solar pressure would tend to blow an atmosphere away.
Other possible contributing factors could be the age of Titan (can't verify right now... for some reason firefox isn't opening up new windows properly) and capturing some gases which were lost by Jupiter. I suppose the age would mainly affect the atmosphere due to, as you previously mentioned, techtonic activity. Oh, and titan may have a strong magnetic field helping hold the atmosphere in (or rather preventing ionic winds from blowing it away.) As Titan is techtonically active, one can assume that it has a molten core. This could set up a dynamo system similar to that hypothesized to creat the Earth's magnetic poles.
Okay, I guess that ended up being a lot more than two reasons.
Hmm... consider that many retail outlets sell their products at about twice the price that they actually pay for them (the "cost" figure quoted often times includes internal shipping, storage, expected wages on the item, lighting, advertising, etc.) This doesn't even include the middleman, although that's becoming a smaller piece of the pie as retailers and manufacturers have grown large enough to deal directly with each other, especially in fields like consumer electronics. For the restaurant business a standard sit down meal costs about three times the cost of raw ingredients, but there are is a lot of decently paid labor going in, in addition to decently high facilities and equipment costs.
In a highly efficient factory with volume discounts, etc, I wouldn't doubt that apple can pump them out for around half the "off the shelf" price of its components. PCWorld puts it at about 30-40% profit on the shuffle. Although I really doubt that includes R&D costs.
Disclaimer: I have no personal industry experience in consumer electronics, but know a couple of people who do sales. These people, however, generally do not do purchasing on a nationwide/international scale.
When it means good PR. Most Apple customers seems to be fairly politically liberal anyways, so they generally are going to be very pro-environmental. A move that seems environmentally friendly will go a long way towards swaying more of their potential customers to making more Apple purchases.
You're right. I personally love my 512 meg shuffle. I would have preferred the 1 gig, but it's really not that different to me in day to day use. a 512 will hold a little over eight hours of music, which for me is plenty to last me a couple days of normal on the go listening. But then again I am a fan of playing music randomly and have been for a long time. It really plays on synchronicity and the 23 principle. Not that I really believe in either of those actually having power over the real life, I just think it's a fun game to play. And if the song seems to be particularilly ill suited for my mood or the situation, then skipping it is trivial even if I'm wearing the Shuffle on the lanyard under my shirt.
Although I really haven't found a particularilly good piece of software for updating it. I would really like something that can just autofill from a playlist, rather than having to choose between A)random songs from my entire music library or B)manually filling it up. Sometimes filling from the entire library with a little manual editing at the end can prove useful, but it's usually just too tedious for what I want.
Oh, and the shuffle is really good way to do music for a party. Just use a stereo RCA to mini headphone cable (probably $4 or $5 at Radio Shack) to hook it up to a stereo or PA system. Songs can be skipped if they end up not going over well, and pausing/volume control are fairly simple even if you can somehow lock out the stereo itself (a good thing sometiems.) Best of all, that annoying antisocial drunk guy can't just put in all of the music that he likes which happens to annoy the rest of the party. One thing to remember is mix it up a bit. Have some rocking stuff, have some quiet stuff. Have some really pop bubblegum that everyone knows, have some really cool obscure music that only you know (or that you don't even really know that well yet.) Setting up a playlist and setting the Ipod to playlist mode would probably be the best bet here, but in certain groups shuffle will still have it's place. Caveat: This only works if you aren't that annoying antisocial guy who puts in a whole bunch of music that annoys everyone else. And you have to trust people enough to not steal the thing. But if you don't, why are they in your house anyways?
If it's becoming more painful rather than less, that means that they want to do the replacing rather than you doing it. Whether that is because Apple is a predatory company looking to make as much money as they can, or if it's because Apple is acting to prevent predatory lawsuits from customers who get injured in an explosion caused by an el-cheapo(tm) aftermarket battery all depends on whether you like Apple or not.
In this case they'd get performance gains by the CPU not crashing out. As urban legend goes, Google doesn't do any troubleshooting or repair on failed PCs, they simply let them sit there untill the next upgrade cycle, possibly doing a post-mortem to avoid repeat problems in the future. Higher end CPUs are designed to be stretched further than cheaper/older ones, so if underclocked they will last longer than simply an older chip. Smaller die sizes and more efficient processing algorithms may also reduce electrical power requirements for a given processing power, which is something that could add up to a real amount of money spent on a CPU grinding away 24/7. Reducing power requirements also means less waste heat, which can allow passive (and therefore silent) cooling in situations where PC noise is unnaceptable. While it may seem counterintuitive, cost/benefit analysis may show that underclocking carries an advantage in certain situations.
These aren't going to fit everyone's need. One particular place that comes to mind is high level amateur audio/video processing and recording. At this level one will need special cards, more ram, more hard drive space, and a little more raw processing power than a laptop can really handle. Add to this multiple CD/DVD burners, multiple displays and special breakout boxes and the tablets/laptops that transmeta chips are designed for become a no-go for your system. Doing basic google, froogle and new egg searches, as well as Transmeta's website made no mention was made of a desktop based solution. Via's website seems to be down right now, and I can't find much info on their silent computing initiative.
While professionals will be able to pretty much acoustically separate their computers from the recording area, this is usually not economically reasonable at the amateur, or even some small scale amateur levels. Pulling some tricks like passive cooling, usage of remote disk space (not necesarilly an option due to performance concerns,) a low noise power supply, DIY acoustic insulation (EG a box with insulating material with only enough openings for cooling and cabling, plus access for removable drives) can bring the computer's sound profile down to acceptable levels. Underclocking and undervolting a CPU can be an important step in achieving passive cooling, as many DIYers have found.
I think the power supply requirements are more based on a gamer rig than your everyday Joe workstation. Incredible video cards, multiple hard drives (possibly in RAID configuration striped for speed,) overclocking, cooling systems, and then bling (flourescent lights, etc) all suck down power. I doubt that a power supply will always draw it's peak power, so having a litttle headway is worth it to keep the system a little stable.
I really doubt a tiny hole drilled by people through the crust to the mantle would cause much widespread environmental harm. Magma is very often vented to the surface in the form of volcanoes. This should be insignificant compared to the sum total of heat and greenhouse gasses released to the atmospher by natural processes
I'd guess not. They probably signed a contract stating that "I will not sue, this contract is final and binding, etc etc." That and it could potentially fit in ex post facto rulings. Basically ex post facto is when somebody is commited of a crime, but the action they took was before the law was in effect. It has been decided that laws can not be tried ex post facto, due to the high potential for abuse and persecution of certain parties that they provide.
Except I'm not quite sure if ex post facto actually applies to tort law, or simply to legislation. That and it could be argued that the contract was not binding since it was signed under threat of duress (even though duress is traditionally defined as a threat of physical violence, it could be stretched here. Especially if the RIAA/MPAA lawyers had lied about the situation that was at hand.)
And then there's the term for the place that pedestrians cross the street, usually marked with thick white lines, or the Zebra Crossing. Wow... I thought that British comedians were joking, or at least exaggerating when they made fun of the royal bureaucratic language. These Crossing give pedestrians the right of way however they must make sure that all traffic has stopped before they use the crossing. This doesn't even get into the pelican, puffin and toucan crossings.
All this without even getting into this stuff. Try throwing some Cockney into a conversation, and you just end up with confused looks. Which I suppose is the point.
That's only assuming that an increase of CO2 causes global warming. It is definately possible that global warming causes CO2 levels to rise, but the correlation shown was taken by scientists to mean that CO2 caused global warming, putting the wagon before the horse.
And besides, it is possible that releasing CO2 causes global warming, which increases CO2 output in a postitive feedback loop. Basically what this would mean is that once you are over some level, the feedback loop will cause an unstoppable rise in global warming, untill some other equilibrium is hit that pushes it back down.
I wasn't intending to say that global warming is definately not caused by mankind, but I don't believe that it has been scientifically proven without a doubt that mankind is causing it either. Honestly, I sort of stand on the well, we really don't have proof that our emissions are not causing some environmental change that will lead to our destruction. The ill effects cited (primarilly economic) of environmentalism really are very little to worry about compared to the chance of causing our complete obliteration.
Re:Just don't burn the diesel
on
Filling Up On Algae
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Okay, I am an environmentalist. I have a degree in conservation biology. And I also know that studies have pretty much proven that the earth's climate fluctuations are directly linked to... total insolation from the sun. The sun's total energy output fluctuates over time, and when there is more energy coming in, the earth warms up.
But what about the perfect lock-step match between temperatures and atmospheric CO2 you ask? Easy. People talk about the tundra permafrost melting and releasing CO2 and sure, that's gonna cause some raise in temperature. But the big one? Gasses are more soluble in cold water than warm. With global warming, the oceans can't hold as much CO2, and so outgass it to the atmosphere. CO2 levels rise BECAUSE of global warming, not necesarilly the other way around.
Yes... global warming is going on. But whether it is mankind that is causing it is actually a lot more up for debate than you seem to think.
Re:It will be economically viable, one day
on
Filling Up On Algae
·
· Score: 1
The real question is: how much energy does it take to produce vegetable oil. Seriously: factor in fertilizer, watering, harvesting, transportation, processing, and another round of transportation. There are some who think you won't even break even. As in it would take 1.1 barrels of biodiesel to produce 1 barrel of biodiesel. How expensive is it if that is true?
Slashdot Mirror
And apparently there is now even more reason to underclock your chips.
This is for "electronics retailers" which I assume means Best Buy and Circuit City. I wouldn't worry* about being ripped off if you get your PC from them rather than rolling your own. But what I really think this means is that A)laptops are hard (impossible?) to assemble yourself from off the shelf/internet ordered components while it is easy (almost trivial to anyone familiar with computer hardware) to make a desktop.
(* The reason not to worry about it is because you can allready assume that you are getting ripped off.)
Perhaps because the company that they contracted with to originally get the information is probably interstate?
It affects the interstate market for nannies, as well as the nanny's demand for interstate commerce, and thus constitutes interstate commerce.
More importantly, the records collection agency that you got the info on your nanny from is likely interstate (if not in their customer base, then at the very least in their information base.) That could easilly provide grounds for putting any information collected under the jurisdiction of interstate commerce. So just shred your nannie's credit report. Now it's probably the law, in addition to just being plain ethical.
Paper will decompose under the proper conditions. A landfill is pretty much completely oxygen free with no source of water (landfills are capped to prevent water from leaching toxic chemicals out) meaning that they biological processes which break paper down no longer function. Newspapers discarded over 40 years before have been out of landfills which were still readable. more info. Considering that after compaction paper historically took up about half of the space in a landfill, this is actually a big deal.
If anything, though, I'd see this act reducing the amount of paper going into landfills. It would mean that people think twice before throwing a piece of paper in the regular garbage. Recycling would be a more sure bet of actually destroying the paper in such a way that it is rendered un-reassemblable than throwing in a landfill.
Yeah... 140 hours. Oops. And I proofread that one. Oh well.
If they are only offering a 2 hour game, then it had better be 1/70th the price of a 140 minute game (assuming similar replayability.) Okay, maybe even 1/7th of the price would be appropriate. Hmm... a series of $10 episodes of a very high quality video game? Might that actually take off? Video rental places would either make a killing off of it or suffer dramatically, depending on if they marketed them the same as regular games.
I think the industry would end up losing out if it went to this. Basically a group of friends could get together and split the costs. On second thoughts, people trade video games all the time. It was a right of passage as a teenager/preteen. This could even work to disuade piracy in a "It's not my time to hack this $10 little game" way.
And then after a while, just release the whole thing as one giant box set with a couple of bonus features. Could probably charge more for that than for a single game, but volume just wouldn't be that high. However this would be after development costs are pretty much paid off anyways.
I don't know... I'm not a video game developer. And the ones I know would probably just laugh at the idea.
The punishment for physically stealing the CD from a store would be less than warezing it.
Before life came about, the Earth was most likely regolith. If you got life to live long and reproduce for long enough, Mars would eventually have soil. Probably far different than our soil due to the massive differences in atmospheric and hydraulic profiles, but something would come about.
That really wouldn't be that strange. I imagine it would be the end goal of sending us here in the first place. Along the lines of panspermy, but on a more local level.
I'd imagine two reasons:
1) Titan's surface temperature appears to be about -178C (-289F). These temperatures mean that different gasses would be present in the atmosphere, although Nitrogen still appears to be the primary gas.
2) Since Titan is further away from the sun, it experiences less solar pressure. Solar pressure would tend to blow an atmosphere away.
Other possible contributing factors could be the age of Titan (can't verify right now... for some reason firefox isn't opening up new windows properly) and capturing some gases which were lost by Jupiter. I suppose the age would mainly affect the atmosphere due to, as you previously mentioned, techtonic activity. Oh, and titan may have a strong magnetic field helping hold the atmosphere in (or rather preventing ionic winds from blowing it away.) As Titan is techtonically active, one can assume that it has a molten core. This could set up a dynamo system similar to that hypothesized to creat the Earth's magnetic poles.
Okay, I guess that ended up being a lot more than two reasons.
Hmm... consider that many retail outlets sell their products at about twice the price that they actually pay for them (the "cost" figure quoted often times includes internal shipping, storage, expected wages on the item, lighting, advertising, etc.) This doesn't even include the middleman, although that's becoming a smaller piece of the pie as retailers and manufacturers have grown large enough to deal directly with each other, especially in fields like consumer electronics. For the restaurant business a standard sit down meal costs about three times the cost of raw ingredients, but there are is a lot of decently paid labor going in, in addition to decently high facilities and equipment costs.
In a highly efficient factory with volume discounts, etc, I wouldn't doubt that apple can pump them out for around half the "off the shelf" price of its components. PCWorld puts it at about 30-40% profit on the shuffle. Although I really doubt that includes R&D costs.
Disclaimer: I have no personal industry experience in consumer electronics, but know a couple of people who do sales. These people, however, generally do not do purchasing on a nationwide/international scale.
When it means good PR. Most Apple customers seems to be fairly politically liberal anyways, so they generally are going to be very pro-environmental. A move that seems environmentally friendly will go a long way towards swaying more of their potential customers to making more Apple purchases.
You're right. I personally love my 512 meg shuffle. I would have preferred the 1 gig, but it's really not that different to me in day to day use. a 512 will hold a little over eight hours of music, which for me is plenty to last me a couple days of normal on the go listening. But then again I am a fan of playing music randomly and have been for a long time. It really plays on synchronicity and the 23 principle. Not that I really believe in either of those actually having power over the real life, I just think it's a fun game to play. And if the song seems to be particularilly ill suited for my mood or the situation, then skipping it is trivial even if I'm wearing the Shuffle on the lanyard under my shirt.
Although I really haven't found a particularilly good piece of software for updating it. I would really like something that can just autofill from a playlist, rather than having to choose between A)random songs from my entire music library or B)manually filling it up. Sometimes filling from the entire library with a little manual editing at the end can prove useful, but it's usually just too tedious for what I want.
Oh, and the shuffle is really good way to do music for a party. Just use a stereo RCA to mini headphone cable (probably $4 or $5 at Radio Shack) to hook it up to a stereo or PA system. Songs can be skipped if they end up not going over well, and pausing/volume control are fairly simple even if you can somehow lock out the stereo itself (a good thing sometiems.) Best of all, that annoying antisocial drunk guy can't just put in all of the music that he likes which happens to annoy the rest of the party. One thing to remember is mix it up a bit. Have some rocking stuff, have some quiet stuff. Have some really pop bubblegum that everyone knows, have some really cool obscure music that only you know (or that you don't even really know that well yet.) Setting up a playlist and setting the Ipod to playlist mode would probably be the best bet here, but in certain groups shuffle will still have it's place. Caveat: This only works if you aren't that annoying antisocial guy who puts in a whole bunch of music that annoys everyone else. And you have to trust people enough to not steal the thing. But if you don't, why are they in your house anyways?
If it's becoming more painful rather than less, that means that they want to do the replacing rather than you doing it. Whether that is because Apple is a predatory company looking to make as much money as they can, or if it's because Apple is acting to prevent predatory lawsuits from customers who get injured in an explosion caused by an el-cheapo(tm) aftermarket battery all depends on whether you like Apple or not.
In this case they'd get performance gains by the CPU not crashing out. As urban legend goes, Google doesn't do any troubleshooting or repair on failed PCs, they simply let them sit there untill the next upgrade cycle, possibly doing a post-mortem to avoid repeat problems in the future. Higher end CPUs are designed to be stretched further than cheaper/older ones, so if underclocked they will last longer than simply an older chip. Smaller die sizes and more efficient processing algorithms may also reduce electrical power requirements for a given processing power, which is something that could add up to a real amount of money spent on a CPU grinding away 24/7. Reducing power requirements also means less waste heat, which can allow passive (and therefore silent) cooling in situations where PC noise is unnaceptable. While it may seem counterintuitive, cost/benefit analysis may show that underclocking carries an advantage in certain situations.
These aren't going to fit everyone's need. One particular place that comes to mind is high level amateur audio/video processing and recording. At this level one will need special cards, more ram, more hard drive space, and a little more raw processing power than a laptop can really handle. Add to this multiple CD/DVD burners, multiple displays and special breakout boxes and the tablets/laptops that transmeta chips are designed for become a no-go for your system. Doing basic google, froogle and new egg searches, as well as Transmeta's website made no mention was made of a desktop based solution. Via's website seems to be down right now, and I can't find much info on their silent computing initiative.
While professionals will be able to pretty much acoustically separate their computers from the recording area, this is usually not economically reasonable at the amateur, or even some small scale amateur levels. Pulling some tricks like passive cooling, usage of remote disk space (not necesarilly an option due to performance concerns,) a low noise power supply, DIY acoustic insulation (EG a box with insulating material with only enough openings for cooling and cabling, plus access for removable drives) can bring the computer's sound profile down to acceptable levels. Underclocking and undervolting a CPU can be an important step in achieving passive cooling, as many DIYers have found.
I think the power supply requirements are more based on a gamer rig than your everyday Joe workstation. Incredible video cards, multiple hard drives (possibly in RAID configuration striped for speed,) overclocking, cooling systems, and then bling (flourescent lights, etc) all suck down power. I doubt that a power supply will always draw it's peak power, so having a litttle headway is worth it to keep the system a little stable.
I really doubt a tiny hole drilled by people through the crust to the mantle would cause much widespread environmental harm. Magma is very often vented to the surface in the form of volcanoes. This should be insignificant compared to the sum total of heat and greenhouse gasses released to the atmospher by natural processes
Yes.
I'd guess not. They probably signed a contract stating that "I will not sue, this contract is final and binding, etc etc." That and it could potentially fit in ex post facto rulings. Basically ex post facto is when somebody is commited of a crime, but the action they took was before the law was in effect. It has been decided that laws can not be tried ex post facto, due to the high potential for abuse and persecution of certain parties that they provide.
Except I'm not quite sure if ex post facto actually applies to tort law, or simply to legislation. That and it could be argued that the contract was not binding since it was signed under threat of duress (even though duress is traditionally defined as a threat of physical violence, it could be stretched here. Especially if the RIAA/MPAA lawyers had lied about the situation that was at hand.)
And then there's the term for the place that pedestrians cross the street, usually marked with thick white lines, or the Zebra Crossing. Wow... I thought that British comedians were joking, or at least exaggerating when they made fun of the royal bureaucratic language. These Crossing give pedestrians the right of way however they must make sure that all traffic has stopped before they use the crossing. This doesn't even get into the pelican, puffin and toucan crossings.
All this without even getting into this stuff. Try throwing some Cockney into a conversation, and you just end up with confused looks. Which I suppose is the point.
That's only assuming that an increase of CO2 causes global warming. It is definately possible that global warming causes CO2 levels to rise, but the correlation shown was taken by scientists to mean that CO2 caused global warming, putting the wagon before the horse.
And besides, it is possible that releasing CO2 causes global warming, which increases CO2 output in a postitive feedback loop. Basically what this would mean is that once you are over some level, the feedback loop will cause an unstoppable rise in global warming, untill some other equilibrium is hit that pushes it back down.
I wasn't intending to say that global warming is definately not caused by mankind, but I don't believe that it has been scientifically proven without a doubt that mankind is causing it either. Honestly, I sort of stand on the well, we really don't have proof that our emissions are not causing some environmental change that will lead to our destruction. The ill effects cited (primarilly economic) of environmentalism really are very little to worry about compared to the chance of causing our complete obliteration.
Okay, I am an environmentalist. I have a degree in conservation biology. And I also know that studies have pretty much proven that the earth's climate fluctuations are directly linked to... total insolation from the sun. The sun's total energy output fluctuates over time, and when there is more energy coming in, the earth warms up.
But what about the perfect lock-step match between temperatures and atmospheric CO2 you ask? Easy. People talk about the tundra permafrost melting and releasing CO2 and sure, that's gonna cause some raise in temperature. But the big one? Gasses are more soluble in cold water than warm. With global warming, the oceans can't hold as much CO2, and so outgass it to the atmosphere. CO2 levels rise BECAUSE of global warming, not necesarilly the other way around.
Yes... global warming is going on. But whether it is mankind that is causing it is actually a lot more up for debate than you seem to think.
The real question is: how much energy does it take to produce vegetable oil. Seriously: factor in fertilizer, watering, harvesting, transportation, processing, and another round of transportation. There are some who think you won't even break even. As in it would take 1.1 barrels of biodiesel to produce 1 barrel of biodiesel. How expensive is it if that is true?