I figure they're being upsold on '120HZ REFRESH!!!!' and 'Image smoothing' and all the other buzzwords that tend to float around the most expensive screens in a store. Sure, '3D COMPATIBLE' is in there, but the buyer isn't concerned about that, he's buying it because it's the best looking screen (convienently also placed in the best looking spot in the store), etc...
Displaying 3D is not standardised (horizontal or circular polarisation, active shutter, funky-multi-layer-dichroic-anaglyph, etc), but this makes no difference whatsoever.
Depending on the technology used, it DOES matter though. Why? Because with all the HD image techs you listed, nobody needs special glasses to see the image.
With most existing 3D techs, you need the glasses. What happens when you get friends over? When you break a set, or they just fail? Right now you can't just order generic glasses, your friends, assuming they have 3D, would likely have different 3D and would thus have different glasses.
They aren't even standardized as far as blink rate synchronization goes, so many glasses, even if the sets of different makers use the same basic tech, aren't inter-compatible.
You have to remember that time is money - people are willing to pay quite a bit of money to save time. Cars also provide quite a bit of storage space.
So to really start cutting down on car usage, you're going to have to make public transportation faster and more convenient, not just cheaper.
Most bus systems operate on a spoke system - To get to a destination that's six miles away, I might have to travel like 10 miles to get downtown, then 10 miles back on another bus, adding up to 'I might as well walk' amounts of time.
with one good design and then popping it out like an assembly-line.
Thing is, the energy market is big and diverse enough that it ends up like other products. Going with one source will raise the cost of it excessively, so you exploit a number of sources, preferably before their costs start skyrocketing.
Take heating a house. Common choices are electric, natural gas, propane, and oil. Less common choices include wood, corn, wood pellets, and coal.
Try to put EVERYONE on electric, and electric rates would rise substantially, same with any of the others. Each has different ups and downs as well.
I think there's some more factors as well. In China there's a lot less material goods to worry about. I'm willing to bet that you'd be a lot more mobile if jobs provided living quarters and it only took a suitcase or two for you to move.
What if, in the USA, if the standard wasn't just for the appliances such as fridge, washer and dryer to maybe stay, if the furnishings were too? Beds, table, chairs, etc...? People would be a lot more mobile without all that heavy stuff to move around.
Also, I think that the big cities should encourage 'arcologies', putting both businesses and apartments/condos in the same building.
In the US, Emergency Rooms are required by law to stabilize you regardless of your ability to pay. This is part of the EMTALA Act of 1986 and very often hospitals don't get paid for ER services.
And this unfunded mandate is part of why hospitals are having financial difficulties and have to charge so much for OTHER services.
Personally, I'd set up some sort of federally funded default insurance, but it's still a rock and a hard place for the hospitals.
someone could start a fire insurance like this: ask for 74$ a year, it pays the firefighters if you need them. problem: there is no money to pay the firefighters on watch, the equipment and so on, if there is no fire. the money is needed to run the FD, not having it at the beginning of the year makes.
Then the FD needs to charge more for a non-covered call out, the insurance ends up costing $76, and it goes away. Or somebody starts up a rival FD and only charges $70, but I doubt that would happen because even with a volunteer force and surplus equipment(how my old FD was run), it gets expensive.
Heck, our biggest tanker was converted to a tanker from a donated ladder truck by volunteer welders using donated metal, and it STILL ended up costing like $20k before they were done(before my time).
Reading the rules, they have to provide proof of insurance before they'll register a vehicle for the road.
it would make more sense to require the insurance/bond/COD before giving someone a license, rather than after the fact, but far be it from me to understand bureaucracy.
Because insurance is normally attached at least somewhat to the vehicle(civics are less prone to more expensive accidents than BMWs).
Getting a driver's license takes more work and somebody with a license but no vehicle can drive a rental(using the rental's insurance), a friend or relative's vehicle, etc...
Oh, and driving without insurance is a $450 fine, per your site.
Many states require liability insurance before they allow someone to get a driver's license, and thereby provide all drivers a measure of protection from the potential malfeasance of other drivers.
Small correction here. Most states allow you to get a license without any insurance at all.
What they don't allow you to do is register a vehicle without insurance.
Still, it's generally a good idea to get a 'un/under-insured motorist' clause on your policy. That covers you if you're hit by a drunk driver with a revoked license driving a uninsured or stolen car.
I saw somewhere that there's a law that restricts callout charges, even without 'insurance' to $500, which isn't enough to cover costs. Collection ability is also extremely limited, so they're back to being lucky to see $100 out of every $500 billed.
You're a fuckwit without any clue about ESSENTIAL CIVIL SERVICES.
Is it really an essential civil service in a rural area? Sure, it's a good idea, but in this case nobody died. Some pets did, but that's possible even in the middle of the city, since firefighters will undertake much less risk to save animals, and even less for property.
For my old house, which was cheap, it's quite probable that any major fire would total it. My personal belongings are of types likely to be quickly ruined by fire or the water used to put it out. My real valuables are in fire safes.
At which point 'let it burn' becomes a real option.
To take a completely different tact, I could build my house to a fire safety rating well in excess of national home standards. To the point that setting a couch or something on fire will result in a clean up job, not major repairs.
I could go even further and get my own firefighting equipment, perhaps install a water tank, pump, hose, and nozzle for my own firefighting.
Or be like this guy and do nothing. Well, sucks to be him right now.
This is more a rural area, so not as *big* of a concern (though they did end up responding when the blaze threatened a neighbor who HAD paid).
In the cities, well, they got really socialistic at one point, the fire departments even had the authority to tear down buildings to make fire breaks if they felt it necesssary.
Cities had the first mandatory, city paid for fire departments for pretty much this very reason - you couldn't afford to let a fire blaze because it could easily take out the whole block, even spread beyond. You had cities that lost double digit percentages of their buildings from a single fire.
I just moved OUT of BFE North Dakota(had to look up what BFE stood for).
North Dakota has fire coverage. It might not be that fast, depending on where you live, but it has it.
Mine would have been rather quick. I was a member of the volunteer fire department and lived about a block from the fire station. We had three tanker trucks of varing size. (350gal, 3k, and 5k). The small one wasn't a 'proper' fire engine, more a converted F350. It could reach spots the other two couldn't, though.
Of course, we got money from county, state, AND occasionally federal. We provided universal coverage and had mutial cooperation deals with all neighboring counties and towns. We mostly put out grass fires while I was in.
If the fire station is too far away I'd suggest providing at least some of your own solution - bury a 500 gallon or more tank deep enough that it won't freeze, hook it up to your well, and get a heavy duty hose and pump. Lakes are good in the summer, but up in ND freeze too deep for a FD to tap. Fighting fires depends on water, the more the better. If we don't have to send that tanker back to get more water, that's another hose or two on the fire.
Keep in mind that when fighting fires the more water you can put down in less time the better off you are. Firefighting nozzels can easily break 100gpm.
So you might get 6 minutes of spray from a 500 gallon tank backed up by a residential water pump. We come with pumps, so a bigger well and a hookup(essentially your own private hydrant) will assist us greatly. If you allow us to use it for the neighbors, you'll gain both the neighbors and our gratitude.
they could charge the homeowner whatever turns out to be the actual cost of the service (the annual cost of having the resources available divided by the average number of fires per year, plus a surcharge for "forgetting" to pay). It might be several thousand dollars, and it's up to the homeowner to decide whether his house is worth paying for the service or not.
All fine and dandy except for one niggling problem:
Federal law limits post-fire bills to $500. This isn't enough to keep people paying the $75, nor enough to cover actual expenses. So they let it burn.
Yet if that town has a police force I'd likely still have to pay fines levied by them even though I live outside their jurisdiction.
Along the same lines, if your car caught fire in their town the fire department would put it out for you. Their property tax supported ambulance would take you to the hospital.
The problem here isn't the city. The town/city is being nice to provide fire protection outside of their jurisdiction, but that costs money, and the $75 fee is what they can do to cover their extra expenses.
because time is wasted checking to see if they're on the list (and faffing around resolving mis-spellings, no-doubt) when the firefighters SHOULD be going to put out the fire immediately.
From other discussions, the fire department in question has very few homes that are on the list of 'didn't pay'.
Oh, and the estimates for the county setting up universal coverage is more like $120/home, not $75, so they're getting a deal.
What if there had been a life on the line, someone trapped inside the building
The responses I've seen would have them committing to a rescue in that case. In this case there wasn't even any animals left in the house, so they just let it burn.
AFTER rescuing anybody in the home, they'd have let it burn.
Think of it like insurance. $75 doesn't come anywhere NEAR what it costs to roll the trucks. If you let him get away with simply paying the $75 AFTER he got a fire, that's like not buying life insurance until you find out that you have a lethal disease.
Basically, you'd quickly end up broke as OTHER people in the county stopped paying the $75/year unless they had a fire.
Actual callout costs would be more like $7500, which, from what I learned at another forum, would be more than the reported value of his house(!?!?). Me, who just moved out of a $15k rural home, wonder just how bad it'd have to be to be valued for like $5k.
Federal law apparently limits the fire department to a $500 call charge, and they can't really enforce even that. Given that I estimate the cost of a callout at 'way more than that', their only option is to refuse service.
Why can't security professionals (Comodo, I'm looking at you) learn how to sign their installers and updates? Botnet commanders have done this for years.
Many of them DO, but as you mention, the malware writers are signing them, and many legitimate software providers aren't.
Ergo, signed binaries aren't as trusted as they perhaps should be, then you have the whole problem that many users don't understand what signing means for a binary.
Not that one or two of those proposed 25MW nuclear generators wouldn't be out of line either.
25MW, $25M Assuming that's ONLY for the reactor, not the steam plant to actually produce the electricity, say $50M for a power plant
Let's assume that $100/gallon is a worst case scenario for a short period of time of intense fuel convoy attacks, and that it averages closer to $10-20/gallon.
Diesel is 37.3 MJ/L, $2.64-5.28/L, Assuming 30% efficiency*, 1 MJ =.278 kWh, 3.11 kWh per Liter, or $.85-1.70 per kwh, using diesel. Ouch. A $50M 25MW plant, assuming a 90% capacity factor, should produce 197 Million kwh a year. Assuming it lasts 5 years, that's closer to 5 cents a kwh. Even if we double the cost AGAIN to $100M, that's still only 10 cents a kwh before operation expenses.
$800 for 200 watts of solar panel doesn't seem out of line right now. Figure once we're done militarizing it, adding extra components like inverters, and shipping, $1600 for 200 watts. Being fairly generous, that 200 watt panels should produce ~ 788 kwh/year. Figure on 5 year timeframe**, that's 41 cents a kwh.
Either way I see potential for major savings. I'm forced to agree that for bases that are large enough, a suitable nuclear generator would probably be the best solution. For the small ones, solar power looks like a good solution, but you'll still need a generator.
*A GW scale plant can get over 50%, but we're looking at big IC diesel engines. **Both the reactor and panels should last longer, but I'm being paranoid here. Diesel generators are easy to move and clean up after, relatively speaking.
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When it comes to my vehicle and damage caused by critters, well, I'm almost that heartless...
I figure they're being upsold on '120HZ REFRESH!!!!' and 'Image smoothing' and all the other buzzwords that tend to float around the most expensive screens in a store. Sure, '3D COMPATIBLE' is in there, but the buyer isn't concerned about that, he's buying it because it's the best looking screen (convienently also placed in the best looking spot in the store), etc...
Displaying 3D is not standardised (horizontal or circular polarisation, active shutter, funky-multi-layer-dichroic-anaglyph, etc), but this makes no difference whatsoever.
Depending on the technology used, it DOES matter though. Why? Because with all the HD image techs you listed, nobody needs special glasses to see the image.
With most existing 3D techs, you need the glasses. What happens when you get friends over? When you break a set, or they just fail? Right now you can't just order generic glasses, your friends, assuming they have 3D, would likely have different 3D and would thus have different glasses.
They aren't even standardized as far as blink rate synchronization goes, so many glasses, even if the sets of different makers use the same basic tech, aren't inter-compatible.
You have to remember that time is money - people are willing to pay quite a bit of money to save time. Cars also provide quite a bit of storage space.
So to really start cutting down on car usage, you're going to have to make public transportation faster and more convenient, not just cheaper.
Most bus systems operate on a spoke system - To get to a destination that's six miles away, I might have to travel like 10 miles to get downtown, then 10 miles back on another bus, adding up to 'I might as well walk' amounts of time.
It's part of the reason I like PRT - individual on demand non-stop cars can actually be faster than cars. Go with an electrified rail system and it can beat cars in efficiency and pollution as well.
with one good design and then popping it out like an assembly-line.
Thing is, the energy market is big and diverse enough that it ends up like other products. Going with one source will raise the cost of it excessively, so you exploit a number of sources, preferably before their costs start skyrocketing.
Take heating a house. Common choices are electric, natural gas, propane, and oil. Less common choices include wood, corn, wood pellets, and coal.
Try to put EVERYONE on electric, and electric rates would rise substantially, same with any of the others. Each has different ups and downs as well.
are fleeing the local city government due to its failure to police and educate its residents.
Yeah, that's something to fix, alright. Perhaps we stick a private school in the skyscraper as well?
I think there's some more factors as well. In China there's a lot less material goods to worry about. I'm willing to bet that you'd be a lot more mobile if jobs provided living quarters and it only took a suitcase or two for you to move.
What if, in the USA, if the standard wasn't just for the appliances such as fridge, washer and dryer to maybe stay, if the furnishings were too? Beds, table, chairs, etc...? People would be a lot more mobile without all that heavy stuff to move around.
Also, I think that the big cities should encourage 'arcologies', putting both businesses and apartments/condos in the same building.
In the US, Emergency Rooms are required by law to stabilize you regardless of your ability to pay. This is part of the EMTALA Act of 1986 and very often hospitals don't get paid for ER services.
And this unfunded mandate is part of why hospitals are having financial difficulties and have to charge so much for OTHER services.
Personally, I'd set up some sort of federally funded default insurance, but it's still a rock and a hard place for the hospitals.
someone could start a fire insurance like this: ask for 74$ a year, it pays the firefighters if you need them. problem: there is no money to pay the firefighters on watch, the equipment and so on, if there is no fire. the money is needed to run the FD, not having it at the beginning of the year makes.
Then the FD needs to charge more for a non-covered call out, the insurance ends up costing $76, and it goes away. Or somebody starts up a rival FD and only charges $70, but I doubt that would happen because even with a volunteer force and surplus equipment(how my old FD was run), it gets expensive.
Heck, our biggest tanker was converted to a tanker from a donated ladder truck by volunteer welders using donated metal, and it STILL ended up costing like $20k before they were done(before my time).
I'm not sure how this is enforced;
Reading the rules, they have to provide proof of insurance before they'll register a vehicle for the road.
it would make more sense to require the insurance/bond/COD before giving someone a license, rather than after the fact, but far be it from me to understand bureaucracy.
Because insurance is normally attached at least somewhat to the vehicle(civics are less prone to more expensive accidents than BMWs).
Getting a driver's license takes more work and somebody with a license but no vehicle can drive a rental(using the rental's insurance), a friend or relative's vehicle, etc...
Oh, and driving without insurance is a $450 fine, per your site.
Many states require liability insurance before they allow someone to get a driver's license, and thereby provide all drivers a measure of protection from the potential malfeasance of other drivers.
Small correction here. Most states allow you to get a license without any insurance at all.
What they don't allow you to do is register a vehicle without insurance.
Still, it's generally a good idea to get a 'un/under-insured motorist' clause on your policy. That covers you if you're hit by a drunk driver with a revoked license driving a uninsured or stolen car.
I saw somewhere that there's a law that restricts callout charges, even without 'insurance' to $500, which isn't enough to cover costs. Collection ability is also extremely limited, so they're back to being lucky to see $100 out of every $500 billed.
You're a fuckwit without any clue about ESSENTIAL CIVIL SERVICES.
Is it really an essential civil service in a rural area? Sure, it's a good idea, but in this case nobody died. Some pets did, but that's possible even in the middle of the city, since firefighters will undertake much less risk to save animals, and even less for property.
For my old house, which was cheap, it's quite probable that any major fire would total it. My personal belongings are of types likely to be quickly ruined by fire or the water used to put it out. My real valuables are in fire safes.
At which point 'let it burn' becomes a real option.
To take a completely different tact, I could build my house to a fire safety rating well in excess of national home standards. To the point that setting a couch or something on fire will result in a clean up job, not major repairs.
I could go even further and get my own firefighting equipment, perhaps install a water tank, pump, hose, and nozzle for my own firefighting.
Or be like this guy and do nothing. Well, sucks to be him right now.
Would jury nullifaction hold once the prosecution presents all the evidence? The reasoning behind the chief not putting the fire out?
As has been stated elsewhere, the cost for fighting a fire ends up quite high, and post-fire billing doesn't collect anywhere near enough to cover it.
Agreeing to a contract ("put out the fire, I'll pay you later") under duress or coercion is a surefire way of having the contract rendered void.
So how do emergency rooms and hospitals do it? Often the person isn't even concious when they come in.
This is more a rural area, so not as *big* of a concern (though they did end up responding when the blaze threatened a neighbor who HAD paid).
In the cities, well, they got really socialistic at one point, the fire departments even had the authority to tear down buildings to make fire breaks if they felt it necesssary.
Cities had the first mandatory, city paid for fire departments for pretty much this very reason - you couldn't afford to let a fire blaze because it could easily take out the whole block, even spread beyond. You had cities that lost double digit percentages of their buildings from a single fire.
I just moved OUT of BFE North Dakota(had to look up what BFE stood for).
North Dakota has fire coverage. It might not be that fast, depending on where you live, but it has it.
Mine would have been rather quick. I was a member of the volunteer fire department and lived about a block from the fire station. We had three tanker trucks of varing size. (350gal, 3k, and 5k). The small one wasn't a 'proper' fire engine, more a converted F350. It could reach spots the other two couldn't, though.
Of course, we got money from county, state, AND occasionally federal. We provided universal coverage and had mutial cooperation deals with all neighboring counties and towns. We mostly put out grass fires while I was in.
If the fire station is too far away I'd suggest providing at least some of your own solution - bury a 500 gallon or more tank deep enough that it won't freeze, hook it up to your well, and get a heavy duty hose and pump. Lakes are good in the summer, but up in ND freeze too deep for a FD to tap. Fighting fires depends on water, the more the better. If we don't have to send that tanker back to get more water, that's another hose or two on the fire.
Keep in mind that when fighting fires the more water you can put down in less time the better off you are. Firefighting nozzels can easily break 100gpm.
So you might get 6 minutes of spray from a 500 gallon tank backed up by a residential water pump. We come with pumps, so a bigger well and a hookup(essentially your own private hydrant) will assist us greatly. If you allow us to use it for the neighbors, you'll gain both the neighbors and our gratitude.
they could charge the homeowner whatever turns out to be the actual cost of the service (the annual cost of having the resources available divided by the average number of fires per year, plus a surcharge for "forgetting" to pay). It might be several thousand dollars, and it's up to the homeowner to decide whether his house is worth paying for the service or not.
All fine and dandy except for one niggling problem:
Federal law limits post-fire bills to $500. This isn't enough to keep people paying the $75, nor enough to cover actual expenses. So they let it burn.
Yet if that town has a police force I'd likely still have to pay fines levied by them even though I live outside their jurisdiction.
Along the same lines, if your car caught fire in their town the fire department would put it out for you. Their property tax supported ambulance would take you to the hospital.
The problem here isn't the city. The town/city is being nice to provide fire protection outside of their jurisdiction, but that costs money, and the $75 fee is what they can do to cover their extra expenses.
because time is wasted checking to see if they're on the list (and faffing around resolving mis-spellings, no-doubt) when the firefighters SHOULD be going to put out the fire immediately.
From other discussions, the fire department in question has very few homes that are on the list of 'didn't pay'.
Oh, and the estimates for the county setting up universal coverage is more like $120/home, not $75, so they're getting a deal.
What if there had been a life on the line, someone trapped inside the building
The responses I've seen would have them committing to a rescue in that case. In this case there wasn't even any animals left in the house, so they just let it burn.
AFTER rescuing anybody in the home, they'd have let it burn.
Think of it like insurance. $75 doesn't come anywhere NEAR what it costs to roll the trucks. If you let him get away with simply paying the $75 AFTER he got a fire, that's like not buying life insurance until you find out that you have a lethal disease.
Basically, you'd quickly end up broke as OTHER people in the county stopped paying the $75/year unless they had a fire.
Actual callout costs would be more like $7500, which, from what I learned at another forum, would be more than the reported value of his house(!?!?). Me, who just moved out of a $15k rural home, wonder just how bad it'd have to be to be valued for like $5k.
Federal law apparently limits the fire department to a $500 call charge, and they can't really enforce even that. Given that I estimate the cost of a callout at 'way more than that', their only option is to refuse service.
In my case I splurge on the higher resolution screens, of whatever size, and end up using the sides for other things.
What we need is some sort of predictive window sizing/placement alogorithm.
Why can't security professionals (Comodo, I'm looking at you) learn how to sign their installers and updates? Botnet commanders have done this for years.
Many of them DO, but as you mention, the malware writers are signing them, and many legitimate software providers aren't.
Ergo, signed binaries aren't as trusted as they perhaps should be, then you have the whole problem that many users don't understand what signing means for a binary.
Not that one or two of those proposed 25MW nuclear generators wouldn't be out of line either.
25MW, $25M
Assuming that's ONLY for the reactor, not the steam plant to actually produce the electricity, say $50M for a power plant
Let's assume that $100/gallon is a worst case scenario for a short period of time of intense fuel convoy attacks, and that it averages closer to $10-20/gallon.
Diesel is 37.3 MJ/L, $2.64-5.28/L, Assuming 30% efficiency*, 1 MJ = .278 kWh, 3.11 kWh per Liter, or $.85-1.70 per kwh, using diesel. Ouch.
A $50M 25MW plant, assuming a 90% capacity factor, should produce 197 Million kwh a year. Assuming it lasts 5 years, that's closer to 5 cents a kwh. Even if we double the cost AGAIN to $100M, that's still only 10 cents a kwh before operation expenses.
$800 for 200 watts of solar panel doesn't seem out of line right now. Figure once we're done militarizing it, adding extra components like inverters, and shipping, $1600 for 200 watts. Being fairly generous, that 200 watt panels should produce ~ 788 kwh/year. Figure on 5 year timeframe**, that's 41 cents a kwh.
Either way I see potential for major savings. I'm forced to agree that for bases that are large enough, a suitable nuclear generator would probably be the best solution. For the small ones, solar power looks like a good solution, but you'll still need a generator.
*A GW scale plant can get over 50%, but we're looking at big IC diesel engines.
**Both the reactor and panels should last longer, but I'm being paranoid here. Diesel generators are easy to move and clean up after, relatively speaking.