Well, this is one of the big reasons. We lug hundreds, or even thousands of pounds of safety equipment around. To the point where we need esoteric "hybrid" drive trains to obtain a fraction of the distance per unit fuel that small cars three decades ago got with crappy, inefficient, four-bangers manufactured to oil-guzzling tolerances.
No, because it's the governments job to protect my neighbors and the power company's repair crews from me. If I burnt my house down, it would at the very least damage my neighbor's house, if not catch it on fire as well. If I wire the generator into the mains, I could electrocute a linesman.
It's also a service provided to me to demonstrate to my insurance company that the job was done correctly. That way I can actually buy insurance.
That depends on where he lives. If he's in a rural area of New England with overhead power lines, he'll probably have a few power outages that are longer than an hour each year. Longer than a few days is pretty rare, but depending on the setup he gets it could get a decent amount of use just for those brief outtages as well as during an extended blackout.
If he gets a multi-hundred pound, noisy portable rig thought, you're right. It'll collect dust until an extended blackout. All the more reason to wait and get something good.
Electricians have to be licensed, yes. For two reasons. One is that they're required to learn the safety regulations. The other is for consumer protection from fraud.
However, that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with doing it yourself. Your licensed electrician may not even have graduated high school. It's not rocket science. Your local town government will give/sell you a book with all the regulations in it. In many areas you can get a "homeowner" permit to do almost any electrical work you want yourself. You still have to get an inspection to make sure you did it right, but anybody with half a brain can learn the same regulations and requirements that your electrician did. You can pay somebody who "knows the deal" to do it, or you can be the person who "knows the deal".
There's nothing wrong with being self reliant. As a bonus it also saves you money, and comes in handy when there's a sudden surge in demand for a particular service that you happen to need too... (Like when the power goes out and everybody is trying to hire the only electrician in town).
Every two phase generator in the 2-8kW range on the market right now uses a L14-30 twist lock plug, and not a dryer plug.
If you forget to turn off the main, you'll likely just blow the breaker on the generator. Next worse case is that you'll stall it out. Or, it could be like my neighbor who had the fuse on the pole blown, and a line down.... You'll just end up powering a street light and not notice you forgot to turn it off.
As somebody who was also without power for a week recently, I can say with some authority that if you're going to buy a generator when hundreds of thousands of people in a hundred mile radius of you are also without power, you're not going to get an ideal generator, or even close to exactly what you want. You're going to get what's available (if there's anything at all).
If he can wait it out until next month, he'll more generator for much less money.
It's more than bias with Rush though. For starters, he doesn't have a news program, he has a talk show. I'd actually call it an "entertainment" talkshow. Think "Howard Stern", but with Republican politics instead of bodily functions. I used to listen to it in the late '90s, but I got tired of it the same way I got tired of Stern. It's predictable, boring, and only entertaining so many times.
People from other countries tend to think of CNN as "right wing", but that's more because they have a different definition of "right wing" where they come from. It's pretty clear in the context of US politics that CNN is center-left. I think it's the most popular simply because it was the first. I can't imagine it's because most people lean that way. Hell, I live deep in the heart of Blue country (just outside of Boston, MA) and I'd still say the vast majority of people (outside of Cambridge) are slightly to the right of center with their views. They vote Democrat because... Well it's two different reasons for local politics and national politics, but nationally they vote Democrat because the Republican party fields more extreme candidates. We did elect Romney as our governor though....
On NPR it is and always has been "Mr. Bush", but it's already "President Obama", and he's not even president yet. That said, I still listen to NPR as my primary radio news outlet. You merely have to understand the context and apply the appropriate amount of salt...
I wouldn't say media bias is "interesting". It just "is". And there are outlets to fit every bias except "neutral".
Unless things get a few orders of magnitude worse, it'll take some serious trickery to look back on this and call it a "depression". People calling it a depression are seriously misinformed as to what the Great Depression was like. People tend to view the problems they are currently experiencing as worse than what happened to other people in the past. It only stands to reason that looking back on this people will see their future economic "crisis" as worse than this one. If you stand back and look at this objectively, even today you would have a hard time saying what we have now is "worse" than what happened in 2000-2002 depending on which metrics you use.
Even when they allow windows apps, they want them in a citrix environment (which costs an arm and a leg). Suggesting locally installed windows apps has become almost a taboo.
The fact that you cite Citrix combined with Citrix's minuscule market share indicates to me that you don't serve the typical client.
Almost every technology finds some market. Hosted apps are nothing new. Just the current batch of technology is new (And not very novel). There is no reason to believe that things will turn out differently this time compared to all the other attempts.
But "slow" is *really* slow. Like... Give them 20 more years, and they may have "declined" to the size that IBM is now.
Most of these scenarios take the "cloud" for granted. Since the death of mainframes, businesses have been reluctant to adopt hosted apps, even when they are hosted in the company's own datacenters. The number of highly successful cloud app deployments for business will be countable on one hand. A single major outage will derail the cloud computing train for another 10 years or so and history will repeat itself for the 5th (6th?) time... Any scenario that predicts Microsoft's downfall based on the failure to adapt to cloud computing is flawed. #1 & #5. Same with the scenarios that predict Microsoft success based on the cloud. #3 & #4...
In the sort term, I see Microsoft having a huge hit on their hands with Windows 7. CIOs everywhere will pat themselves on the back for saving so much money by skipping a generation, and the software itself will be improved thanks to the massive open beta that was Vista. The new version of Office (running locally) will also be a hit. Internet Explorer will continue to lose marketshare, but Silverlight adoption will increase. That covers the next 4 years. Anybody who claims to have a credible idea of what's going to happen after that is simply guessing.
The democrats not so gently encouraged the regulators to look the other way so that poorer and minority home buyers could get loans, even if they wouldn't otherwise qualify. The republicans went along, because their banker friends loved it too.
The credit problems are completely unrelated to how Madoff got away with his scheme. He got away with it because he lied convincingly to the regulators. He had all the i's dotted and t's crossed on his paperwork, so there was no reason to dig any deeper. People who are willing to break the law outright, and are smart about it, will always do massive amounts of damage before they're caught. Regulations or otherwise.
You don't have to guess where I would "probably" point my finger. In my post I clearly laid the blame on both parties.
In the industries that have large number of H1Bs, the bulk of the unemployed aren't actually "qualified". This is especially true in the IT and software industries. People got jobs during the late '90s because companies were hurting for help. A lot of those people sucked, and are now out of work and bitter that there are H1Bs with "their job". The fact of the matter is that most of those people weren't qualified for the job in the first place. There is still a short supply of people who are actually qualified for IT and software jobs. Hell, the group I work for has been trying to hire a DBA for 6 months. Every time we think we've found one (after interviewing a bunch of unqualified people) they get a better offer from somebody else.
H1Bs aren't the problem. It's people like you having a sense of entitlement that are the problem. Unemployment is only 6%. Go earn yourself a job instead of sitting around bitching about how somebody else has one that's rightfully yours.
(People who *are* qualified, but work in an industry that's out of business also have a problem... But there aren't H1Bs taking their job. Their job is just gone.)
It has been argued, actually, that all the additional regulations over the last few years have made fraud *easier*. The regulators are so busy dealing with the additional regulations and paperwork that they don't have time to investigate other stuff.
Meanwhile, fraudsters just lie to the regulators like they do to everybody else. If somebody is already breaking the law, they're generally not going to have any problem breaking the new law too. You know... That whole "If you outlaw guns" thing...
The Democrats had exactly the same bad housing/credit policy as the republicans (though for different reasons), so it's pretty safe to assume that the economy would have turned out exactly as it did regardless of who won.
Occam's Razor would lead to the conclusion that the only reason this story was posted to slashdot was to boost ad impressions due to partisan bickering.
The thing that's odd to me about the patent is how much marketing data is in there. It talks about potential to revolutionize the EV industry, and compares the technology to batteries... Everything you put in your claims that doesn't need to be there limits the scope. The only reason to put that crap in there is if you're planning on trying to trick somebody into believing it simply because the patent was granted. Any patent attorney with half a brain would have stripped that stuff out of there lest it be used to limit the scope of the patent in the future.
The whole thing screams "investment scam".
(The screen printing process they describe for creating the dielectric layer seems like it would result in a large percentage of the dielectric being made of the nitrocellulose binding resin for the dielectric "ink", rather than their CMBT/PET combo. The "jet milling" process they describe to mill the powders seems like it would introduce significant impurities in the powders. It also seems comical to me that they could achieve a sufficiently uniform dielectric layer through screen printing...)
You step up the voltage with a ladder circuit. The same way they do it in televisions, defibrillator, and portable Stun Guns.
It doesn't matter what the voltage is. It matters how much power is stored, and what the internal resistance is. If maximum output current is the same, you wouldn't care if it was 12v or 1200v when it shorted out. All you care about is energy released per unit time.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, this is one of the big reasons. We lug hundreds, or even thousands of pounds of safety equipment around. To the point where we need esoteric "hybrid" drive trains to obtain a fraction of the distance per unit fuel that small cars three decades ago got with crappy, inefficient, four-bangers manufactured to oil-guzzling tolerances.
Safe, powerful, efficient. Pick one.
...an employee bonus program based on the number of patent filings.
No, because it's the governments job to protect my neighbors and the power company's repair crews from me. If I burnt my house down, it would at the very least damage my neighbor's house, if not catch it on fire as well. If I wire the generator into the mains, I could electrocute a linesman.
It's also a service provided to me to demonstrate to my insurance company that the job was done correctly. That way I can actually buy insurance.
That depends on where he lives. If he's in a rural area of New England with overhead power lines, he'll probably have a few power outages that are longer than an hour each year. Longer than a few days is pretty rare, but depending on the setup he gets it could get a decent amount of use just for those brief outtages as well as during an extended blackout.
If he gets a multi-hundred pound, noisy portable rig thought, you're right. It'll collect dust until an extended blackout. All the more reason to wait and get something good.
Electricians have to be licensed, yes. For two reasons. One is that they're required to learn the safety regulations. The other is for consumer protection from fraud.
However, that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with doing it yourself. Your licensed electrician may not even have graduated high school. It's not rocket science. Your local town government will give/sell you a book with all the regulations in it. In many areas you can get a "homeowner" permit to do almost any electrical work you want yourself. You still have to get an inspection to make sure you did it right, but anybody with half a brain can learn the same regulations and requirements that your electrician did. You can pay somebody who "knows the deal" to do it, or you can be the person who "knows the deal".
There's nothing wrong with being self reliant. As a bonus it also saves you money, and comes in handy when there's a sudden surge in demand for a particular service that you happen to need too... (Like when the power goes out and everybody is trying to hire the only electrician in town).
Two things:
Every two phase generator in the 2-8kW range on the market right now uses a L14-30 twist lock plug, and not a dryer plug.
If you forget to turn off the main, you'll likely just blow the breaker on the generator. Next worse case is that you'll stall it out. Or, it could be like my neighbor who had the fuse on the pole blown, and a line down.... You'll just end up powering a street light and not notice you forgot to turn it off.
As somebody who was also without power for a week recently, I can say with some authority that if you're going to buy a generator when hundreds of thousands of people in a hundred mile radius of you are also without power, you're not going to get an ideal generator, or even close to exactly what you want. You're going to get what's available (if there's anything at all).
If he can wait it out until next month, he'll more generator for much less money.
It's too bad you couldn't simultaneously make that joke and put yourself on the right side of the comparison....
It's more than bias with Rush though. For starters, he doesn't have a news program, he has a talk show. I'd actually call it an "entertainment" talkshow. Think "Howard Stern", but with Republican politics instead of bodily functions. I used to listen to it in the late '90s, but I got tired of it the same way I got tired of Stern. It's predictable, boring, and only entertaining so many times.
People from other countries tend to think of CNN as "right wing", but that's more because they have a different definition of "right wing" where they come from. It's pretty clear in the context of US politics that CNN is center-left. I think it's the most popular simply because it was the first. I can't imagine it's because most people lean that way. Hell, I live deep in the heart of Blue country (just outside of Boston, MA) and I'd still say the vast majority of people (outside of Cambridge) are slightly to the right of center with their views. They vote Democrat because... Well it's two different reasons for local politics and national politics, but nationally they vote Democrat because the Republican party fields more extreme candidates. We did elect Romney as our governor though....
On NPR it is and always has been "Mr. Bush", but it's already "President Obama", and he's not even president yet. That said, I still listen to NPR as my primary radio news outlet. You merely have to understand the context and apply the appropriate amount of salt...
I wouldn't say media bias is "interesting". It just "is". And there are outlets to fit every bias except "neutral".
Unless things get a few orders of magnitude worse, it'll take some serious trickery to look back on this and call it a "depression". People calling it a depression are seriously misinformed as to what the Great Depression was like. People tend to view the problems they are currently experiencing as worse than what happened to other people in the past. It only stands to reason that looking back on this people will see their future economic "crisis" as worse than this one. If you stand back and look at this objectively, even today you would have a hard time saying what we have now is "worse" than what happened in 2000-2002 depending on which metrics you use.
Even when they allow windows apps, they want them in a citrix environment (which costs an arm and a leg). Suggesting locally installed windows apps has become almost a taboo.
The fact that you cite Citrix combined with Citrix's minuscule market share indicates to me that you don't serve the typical client.
Almost every technology finds some market. Hosted apps are nothing new. Just the current batch of technology is new (And not very novel). There is no reason to believe that things will turn out differently this time compared to all the other attempts.
That's why "decline" was in quotes. The definition of decline would either have to be based on influence, or rate of growth.
But "slow" is *really* slow. Like... Give them 20 more years, and they may have "declined" to the size that IBM is now.
Most of these scenarios take the "cloud" for granted. Since the death of mainframes, businesses have been reluctant to adopt hosted apps, even when they are hosted in the company's own datacenters. The number of highly successful cloud app deployments for business will be countable on one hand. A single major outage will derail the cloud computing train for another 10 years or so and history will repeat itself for the 5th (6th?) time... Any scenario that predicts Microsoft's downfall based on the failure to adapt to cloud computing is flawed. #1 & #5. Same with the scenarios that predict Microsoft success based on the cloud. #3 & #4...
In the sort term, I see Microsoft having a huge hit on their hands with Windows 7. CIOs everywhere will pat themselves on the back for saving so much money by skipping a generation, and the software itself will be improved thanks to the massive open beta that was Vista. The new version of Office (running locally) will also be a hit. Internet Explorer will continue to lose marketshare, but Silverlight adoption will increase. That covers the next 4 years. Anybody who claims to have a credible idea of what's going to happen after that is simply guessing.
Usually the "???" step implies that it doesn't exist, and thus you will never achieve the "Profit" step...
Sadly, that doesn't apply in this case.
The policy was lax enforcement.
The democrats not so gently encouraged the regulators to look the other way so that poorer and minority home buyers could get loans, even if they wouldn't otherwise qualify. The republicans went along, because their banker friends loved it too.
The credit problems are completely unrelated to how Madoff got away with his scheme. He got away with it because he lied convincingly to the regulators. He had all the i's dotted and t's crossed on his paperwork, so there was no reason to dig any deeper. People who are willing to break the law outright, and are smart about it, will always do massive amounts of damage before they're caught. Regulations or otherwise.
You don't have to guess where I would "probably" point my finger. In my post I clearly laid the blame on both parties.
In practice, Congress spent that money.
If they didn't want the president to use it on things they didn't like, they shouldn't have given him a $350billion blank check.
In the industries that have large number of H1Bs, the bulk of the unemployed aren't actually "qualified". This is especially true in the IT and software industries. People got jobs during the late '90s because companies were hurting for help. A lot of those people sucked, and are now out of work and bitter that there are H1Bs with "their job". The fact of the matter is that most of those people weren't qualified for the job in the first place. There is still a short supply of people who are actually qualified for IT and software jobs. Hell, the group I work for has been trying to hire a DBA for 6 months. Every time we think we've found one (after interviewing a bunch of unqualified people) they get a better offer from somebody else.
H1Bs aren't the problem. It's people like you having a sense of entitlement that are the problem. Unemployment is only 6%. Go earn yourself a job instead of sitting around bitching about how somebody else has one that's rightfully yours.
(People who *are* qualified, but work in an industry that's out of business also have a problem... But there aren't H1Bs taking their job. Their job is just gone.)
It has been argued, actually, that all the additional regulations over the last few years have made fraud *easier*. The regulators are so busy dealing with the additional regulations and paperwork that they don't have time to investigate other stuff.
Meanwhile, fraudsters just lie to the regulators like they do to everybody else. If somebody is already breaking the law, they're generally not going to have any problem breaking the new law too. You know... That whole "If you outlaw guns" thing...
The executive branch can't spend money. That's congress' job. Which was the point of the comment you responded to.
The Democrats had exactly the same bad housing/credit policy as the republicans (though for different reasons), so it's pretty safe to assume that the economy would have turned out exactly as it did regardless of who won.
Occam's Razor would lead to the conclusion that the only reason this story was posted to slashdot was to boost ad impressions due to partisan bickering.
If Ohio went for Kerry, the economy would have gotten blamed on the Democrats.
That's a pretty broad generalization. I've worked for 4 "tech" companies over the last 10 years, and none gave bonuses to anybody outside of sales.
The thing that's odd to me about the patent is how much marketing data is in there. It talks about potential to revolutionize the EV industry, and compares the technology to batteries... Everything you put in your claims that doesn't need to be there limits the scope. The only reason to put that crap in there is if you're planning on trying to trick somebody into believing it simply because the patent was granted. Any patent attorney with half a brain would have stripped that stuff out of there lest it be used to limit the scope of the patent in the future.
The whole thing screams "investment scam".
(The screen printing process they describe for creating the dielectric layer seems like it would result in a large percentage of the dielectric being made of the nitrocellulose binding resin for the dielectric "ink", rather than their CMBT/PET combo. The "jet milling" process they describe to mill the powders seems like it would introduce significant impurities in the powders. It also seems comical to me that they could achieve a sufficiently uniform dielectric layer through screen printing...)
You step up the voltage with a ladder circuit. The same way they do it in televisions, defibrillator, and portable Stun Guns.
It doesn't matter what the voltage is. It matters how much power is stored, and what the internal resistance is. If maximum output current is the same, you wouldn't care if it was 12v or 1200v when it shorted out. All you care about is energy released per unit time.