Welfare is intended for those who have no job. If you intend to pay people to work for you, thus creating jobs, then there are more people with jobs and fewer who need welfare. Cancelling welfare does not make job opportunities magically appear.
Note: Just passed Microeconomics CLEP, studying for Macroeconomics one.
There's opportunity costs involved with work - some people, for whatever reason, don't like working, do enjoy sitting on their ass watching TV.
So there are people out there who are perfectly willing to get welfare at $X, when they could be out working at $2X. They're comfortable that way.
Eliminate welfare, their options become $0 or $X while working. They find jobs, relatives to mooch off of, go somewhere else, something. You push them out of their comfort zone, they change. Unfortuantly you HAVE to push many people out of their comfort zone before they'll change. Heck, my brother lost his job due to the construction bust in Florida- it wasn't until his savings ran out that he got another job. He was happy to work when he had a job, but go through the effort of finding a job, especially a lower paying one when he could be at home(parent's house) playing WoW? Heck no!
Still, you're increasing the labor supply, so average wages will probably drop some(among unskilled labor; until you hit minimum wage), but by the same token lower average labor costs will result in more labor being used.
I'll note that when states imposed caps on the time people could be on welfare, a large number of people got off welfare, but the number of homeless and such didn't go up significantly, so they were finding options. I remember reading that some moved out of state specifically to get welfare elsewhere.
How about this. Make it really TOUGH to outsource -like say, if you build an offshore factory, it's illegal to import the products there produced back into the corporate host country. Voila - end of offshoring WITHOUT removing the viability of local factories for big overseas markets.
Then what simply happens is that you get a seperate company to do it. A different company builds a factory in the cheap country, then starts importing the product. The in-country company ends up shuttering the factory because they can't compete.
Otherwise you're looking at tariffs and blockades, and those generally harm the country doing more than it does the foreign country; indeed it's worse all around.
Make labor law have REAL teeth. Set minimum wage to maximum welfare times 3. Declare that any business caught paying less than it, to anybody, ever for ANY job will immediately lose it's business license REGARDLESS OF ALL OTHER FACTORS and that INCLUDES if the workers are illegal immigrants. Same rule goes for safe working conditions etc.
Increasing minimum wage simply ensures that people who's labor is worth less than minimum wage don't get employed. I saw it when I was working around people getting close to minimum when it increased - stores economized more on labor. People got less in service. We went from toasting buns(and employing a person to do it) to buying 'pre-toasted'.
For other manufacturing, it'll increase the cost of the product and result in MORE outsourcing.
Illegal immigrants - we can't enforce the laws we have now, how is this going to help?
Personally, I take a different tact - get rid of the minimum wage, but pay welfare on a sliding scale.
Let's say welfare pays $10k if you have no job. Get a job earning $10k and your welfare drops to $7500, so you're now earning $17.5k, you're MUCH better off, whereas the current situation would have you now with a job earning $10k and NOT getting any welfare, thus you're actually better off on welfare.
Get a job earning $40k a year and your benefits completely cease, but at that point do you really care?
It would be even BETTER if there could be a U.N. resolution to that effect, which effectively makes it international law any country not enacting compliant legislation face guaranteed economic sanctions - 100% ban on trade unless your labor laws meet requirements...
Like the USA is going to sign off on something like this, much less China or India. Well, China might, but then just ignore it like they do so many other regulations. Technically China's environmental protection laws are more stringent than the USAs, but they more or less ignore them, thus they have worse air quality than the USA.
Generally, the jobs available to W2W paying so low that most people had to hold down TWO 8-hour-a-day jobs, meaning 16 hours a day of work just to qualify for wellfare
Then it wasn't structured correctly.
Personally, I'm mostly a libertarian. Paying welfare for people who could be working irks me something fierce.
Still, I don't want people starving on the streets or so desperate they turn to crime.
My first plot was simply to take welfare, and if you got a job reduce your benefits by 50% of what you earn. That way you always benefited. Then I learned a bit more about life and opportunity cost and such, so my plan has altered some. Especially with a low paying job 50% might not be enough to pay for the vehicle, gas, insurance, clothing, food, etc...
First, come up with a *MINIMUM* standard of living. It SHOULD be shitty, not include gamestations, cable TV, etc... That's the welfare level. One problem you can get here is that a Healthy Diet costs $$, while a unhealthy(but cheap) one can cost $, and people WILL chose the unhealthy to put the money elsewhere. This was part of the original reason to give out food stamps rather than cash.
Then, if somebody gets a job, decrease benefits by 1/4 to 1/5th the earnings. Be fairly generous with subsidizing education, but keep it real - one region I read about basically trained *EVERYONE* in the program to be welders; they oversaturated the market with welders, resulting in un and under employed welders. Still, you should be able to pick 'hot' job fields that need more people, just pay attention to how many you train. North Dakota might be able to do with a hundred or so extra wind turbine maintainers, but a couple thousand?
Unfortunately, if the demand for said "stuff" is finite,
Thus far the solution has been to eventually move the displaced workers into NEW fields; We might not need many buggy-whip makers anymore, but we need quite a few people making MP3 players today.
A car takes fewer man-hours to build; but there's still plenty of other things people want that could be built.
Derivatives are, at their core, a useful risk management device. The problem is that they ARE complicated products, but in the end they're a form of insurance and firms that offer them should be treated as such.
this system rewards people who produce nothing of value, make nothing, enrich no one's lives, do not create art, do not expand the sphere of human knowledge, and provide no meaningful service to humanity or the country.
This I'll agree with. Even commodity speculators add some value to the economy by providing price/availability stability. But what gain in productivity is there when you're making your money via trading that's not worth anything if it takes longer than 4 seconds? They're doing the equivalent of round down partial cents.
Personally, I'd shut this down by instituting a random 30 second delay in trading requests.
This would work for most people and I predict 90% of desktops will be SSD-only in about 2 years.
Call me a pessimist, but personally I figure that this will take at least 5-10 years. My 2 year figure would be for 50% of laptops being SSD, and I haven't seen any news of SSDs breaking double digit laptop penetration yet.
My reasonings for laptops: 2.5" Drives are more expensive per gig than 3.5", conserving power is a good thing for laptops, and shock resistance is a selling point - basically extra concerns give ssds more advantages in a laptop form factor, whereas in a desktop a few extra watts isn't going to kill you, shock isn't normally a worry, etc...
You're not going to see a 90% penetration until a basic SSD that meets requirements is cheaper than the cheapest HD that meets requirements. This will be difficult as long as manufacturers can get a 80GB HD for like $20.
Remember that for most people price is king, performance is secondary. Then look at that flash is currently like 20 times more expensive than HDs, and is only doubling in capacity per dollar between every 12-18 months. That's 5 doublings left to beat 'current' hard drives.
Once you can get, say, a 100 GB flash drive for cheaper than a 200 GB HD, then I figure the 'base line' units will switch over to SSD, with 'power users' simply installing an ancillary spinning platter - perhaps a 10TB unit?
I know quite a few 'less technically' inclined people running media servers today, downloading tons of HD video, etc... But I also know people who still haven't busted 8 gig, and windows updates take up more space than their my documents + extra installed programs.
It's more along the lines of something good from both worlds.
Sometimes this is better than getting the best of one.
For example, this sounds perfect for my 'games' drive. I tend to install a game, play it intensively for anywhere from a week to a couple months. After that, it tends to go on the backburner, but I might play it every other week or so.
Given the size of games today, I don't want to effectively be paying 50% more for the game to keep it installed on a SSD. It can be a pain in the butt to 'move' an installed program such as the game. I DO like the extra speed offered by SSD, but can put up with slower loads, especially for a game I haven't played in a while.
Heck, don't forget that it's not typical that all files installed are frequently accessed, whether it be game, os, or other program.
On a cost basis, I'd love to see a 3.5" version of this, 1-2 TB of storage, 8-16GB of SSD. Keep my OS and programs on the SSD, move my games to the new combination drive. Don't have to worry about doing file links to preserve my 64GB SSD.
4 GiB of RAM would still have to be filled up at boot, and flash is rounning around $2 a gig vs around $20 for RAM.
$.17 a gig for a 7200rpm laptop hard drive. $2.23 a gig for a SSD $19.50 a gig for the cheapest 2gig ram stick off of newegg.
Sure, RAM is a lot faster even now, but we're back to looking at various levels of cache - 10x the price for.
When you go looking at RAM, I'm going to say it's better off in the system, especially now that so many people are going to 64bit systems, and I've heard that Win7, possibly Vista will use excess RAM for caching. The hybrid drive proposed here is an interesting and I think well positioned device - nonvolatile cache means that the system doesn't have to worry about flushing a relatively huge 4gig of RAM to the disc in case of failure.
So I'm back to that I'd like to see a 'premium' product offering 8 or even 16 GB of flash for the 'caching' operation. That'd allow the commonly used parts of my OS, my most commonly used 2-3 applications, as well as the commonly used files for whatever game I'm playing.
Given the issues with installing STEAM games to different directories, for example, this as a secondary drive for my computer would allow me to install STEAM on it, enjoy my game of the month at (near)SSD speeds, the steam app itself would end up on the flash portion, but I wouldn't have to worry about flushing the game of last month off of the SSD, and I can still play it without downloading it or restoring it from backup if I want to.
Still, confrontations that go to 'broken bones' is far beyond the 'standard' bully.
Like any predator, you only have to make it not worth it to a bully. The old adage 'bullies are cowards' isn't necessarily 100% true, but most will perform the sort of risk assessment a predator has to do - The prey can risk any injury to survive; the predator still has to be able to hunt next week. They try to pick fights where they're unlikely to be injured. If the bully knows he has a good chance of getting a black eye or something from you, he's probably not going to risk it.
I used to get into a fight about once a year, word spread after that and I was left alone.
And I don't think this is just a big cache. I'm pretty sure hard drive caches disappear upon reboot.
Current caches disappear on loss of power because they use volatile ram.
If the file is still present on the spinning platter it's still a cache, just a non-volatile one, which is a good thing when it comes to speeding up boot times and such.
Performance is better than traditional drives in almost all benchmarks, and reaches up to 2x the performance when using commonly accessed files (like, the operating system).
I agree, and I think the 'different partitions' of the parent poster isn't as good of a system as an automatic cache system.
Consider that even for linux installs, not all system files are going to be equally read or written, same with applications and even data files. Some will be used almost all the time, some will collect virtual dust for years.
Newegg prices: 500 GB laptop drive: $65. 13 cents per gig 65 GB SSD: $145. $2.23 per gig. (Went 64GB to avoid small cap premium).
At around 6% of the cost, it's essentially 'free' to duplicate the SSD data on the actual platter. You're paying 52 cents for that 4GB on the platter, $8.92 for the SSD. That puts flash very much in the price range for cache - where you're willing to spend the money for the extra performance, but just can't afford to put everything on there.
I'm sure an 8GB version would make the geeks very happy, but I wouldn't be surprised if 90% of my most commonly accessed files would easily fit on 4GB. More is better, of course, but at 20x the price, how much 'more' is really better?
With smart caching, I wouldn't be surprised if doubling the storage had less than 10% difference in real world performance.
The main reason I'd want 8 or even 16GB is that I recently went to a SSD for my main computer and I LOVE the fast hybernate(and wake up). So there's 4 or eventually 8 GB right there for the hybernate file. Don't forget the whole GB vs GiB debate... Memory uses 'real' gigabytes, which means that you'll likely need 5GB as HD/SSD makers measure them...
Our intellectual property laws allow our economy to realize the value of intangibles, to the recipient of the intangible at the time that he realizes the value, and to the producer at the same time. That puts food on people's tables, clothes on their backs, roofs over their shoulders.
Indeed, one could argue that it was the European recognition of 'intellectual property' that ultimately resulted in the explosion of the machine age, followed by the information age. Before that you got all sorts of mechanical toys - but they were regarded as toys. The Romans, for example, had all the technology necessary for railroads, but they never developed them. Trade secrets were developed, lost, then developed again. It was inefficient.
Now, you don't want to lock stuff up for too long, and I do think that we need to go back to requiring an operational product for a patent, but on the whole, patents are a good thing.
That brings up another point - light synchronization and stop sign minimization. Think about how much gasoline could be saved if we concentrated not on stopping the engine while you're waiting on a red light, but on preventing you from having to stop in the first place?
Talk to the hyper-milers and see how much gas they can save doing 'rolling stops' through stop signs rather than coming to a complete halt.
Now, this would have to be carefully done to keep from increasing the accident rate, but I know of at least two stop signs that could be eliminated on my commute to work. Probably 3-4 if you simply switch to yield signs.
So, where's the Gates Foundation on this one? It seems a perfect avenue for them to do some good for humanity with only a small amount of money spent.
Getting money from the Gates Foundation is in many ways MORE difficult than getting a grant out of the government. The foundation still has limited amounts of money to give, you have to convince the Gates that your cause is worthy and doable.
With the limited, if large, amounts of money to give - there are plenty of worthy causes the Gates won't donate to because they're determined to donate in useful amounts.
A lot of places you donate to, 50% or more of your donation money goes towards soliciting more donations. It's a vicious circle. Bill was determined to avoid that.
So either the Gates have determined that this isn't quite worthy enough, that there's better projects to donate to, or they haven't applied to the Gates Foundation for money.
I know, but when you start getting into the larger cells the weight savings can be quite substantial; then there's also that Lithium polymer is much more flexible in shape than NiMH to reduce the volume cost. Another thing to consider is that NiMH tends to be around 66% efficient at charging, while LiIon is over 90%.
I'd go with Lithium Iron for any appliance I plan on using for more than 2-3 years even without the lower cost. They say that, on average, LiIron has equal capacity after a year, on average, more afer that.
It wouldn't be a bad thing if I could get another MP3 player that runs on a AA.
Let's see: Laptop: Lithium - It's just too big. Netbook: AA batteries; it'd be what, 4-8 of them? Preferably integrate a charger. Flashlight, MP3 player, Bluetooth mouse/keyboard, Electric toothbrush(Effectiveness gains probably minimal; but it's 'funner'): AA, between 2-4
Then just pack a charger; preferably one that does individual cells, not pairs.
I like to avoid AAA because of the substantial energy cost for minimal volumne savings. C/D cells are too much of a pain to get 'real' rechargables for. 2400mAh vs 2200 for the AA.
But do you really think there aren't millions of voters that vote what someone told them to vote already?
I think the point is that while you can bribe voters all you like, they're still untrusted. Heck, bribery is less of a concern than blackmail/threats. With unverified voting, if you bribe me with $100, while I'm pretty likely to vote your way, I can still vote for the other party(How are you going to make that $100 back?). On the other hand, you can't really say 'If you don't vote for X you're fired/finding a new apartment/being beaten bloody/etc...'
You also have to figure that e-machines, being used only a couple times a year on average, have to be competitive with paper based systems as far as cost goes, while a ATM Machine has to be competitive with a teller(or three)'s salary spread over most of a decade.
Oh, and for whatever reason, Diebold didn't use the same people in the effort.
Still, I'll note that while I have some training in responding to biological, as well as chemical and radiological attacks, my first thought was the potential medical benefits of this test.
Antibiotics are getting tougher, we even have a number of anti-virals. They're all targeted, and you don't want to give somebody them if you don't have to. When it comes to bacteria, there's whole listings of phages - but they each target like 1 bacterial strain.
But when it comes to a bacterial infection, speed of treatment is a big deal - 24 hours can make a huge difference. Don't forget the time cost of getting the appropriate phage/anti-viral. I don't imagine that most pharmacies would want to stock 5k or so phages. So it'd be next day fed-ex'd or something. 48 hours until treatment starts, though I imagine 'common' strains would have hospitals/pharmacies/doctors having the appropriate strain on hand.
The problem you run into with netbooks and such is that LiIon has about double the energy density of NiMH. Now, in 'micro' applications the extra charging and protection circuitry reduces or even eliminates this advantage.
But in netbook and larger sizes, the added mass of the charging/protection circuitry is negligible, so you actually get better performance from the LiIon. You could probably make cell phones last quite a bit longer - but the form factor isn't quite right for AA cells - you'd have to make the phone thicker.
Don't have a wireless keyboard, but my wireless mouse has some cheap NiMH cells in it that aren't low discharge. I'm too cheap right now to replace them. I have 4 batteries, two in the mouse, 2 in the charger. Mouse quits working right, I swap them.
As for usage - gaming, browsing, pretty much constant when I'm home.
What I have to wonder is just why you personally are worth the effort it would take to snipe your wireless keyboard and decrypt the bluetooth connection?
Thousands of dollars in bank accounts and investments?
With them using my actual passwords, I'm not likely to get my money back either.
With my training I know just how easy it is, I know it's vanishingly unlikely, but I can't help but be uneasy about it. Which is why I used the word 'paranoid'.
Personally, my 'range' is ~300 miles. Call it 350 to have a safety margin.
That takes around four hours. Eat at breakfast at 6, start driving at 7, stop at 11, eat lunch, drive from 1 to 5, eat dinner, drive another couple hours.
For this application. To reach the 99.9% court standard, we generally apply a number of different tests, all of which are less than 99.9% likely to be correct.
I wonder if you stick a guy in the MRI again the next day would you get a true 75% chance to be right this time, or if somebody who can fool it the first time is likely to fool it again?
Heck, what about combining this with the more traditional lie detector tests? Mythbusters actually rated the traditional test better for their limited not very scientific tests. (No fools vs 1 fool).
Heck, in my case I've bought games on Steam that I already owned, just because it was worth spending the $2.50 to not have to dig through my old CD stack to find the install disc.
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Welfare is intended for those who have no job. If you intend to pay people to work for you, thus creating jobs, then there are more people with jobs and fewer who need welfare. Cancelling welfare does not make job opportunities magically appear.
Note: Just passed Microeconomics CLEP, studying for Macroeconomics one.
There's opportunity costs involved with work - some people, for whatever reason, don't like working, do enjoy sitting on their ass watching TV.
So there are people out there who are perfectly willing to get welfare at $X, when they could be out working at $2X. They're comfortable that way.
Eliminate welfare, their options become $0 or $X while working. They find jobs, relatives to mooch off of, go somewhere else, something. You push them out of their comfort zone, they change. Unfortuantly you HAVE to push many people out of their comfort zone before they'll change. Heck, my brother lost his job due to the construction bust in Florida- it wasn't until his savings ran out that he got another job. He was happy to work when he had a job, but go through the effort of finding a job, especially a lower paying one when he could be at home(parent's house) playing WoW? Heck no!
Still, you're increasing the labor supply, so average wages will probably drop some(among unskilled labor; until you hit minimum wage), but by the same token lower average labor costs will result in more labor being used.
I'll note that when states imposed caps on the time people could be on welfare, a large number of people got off welfare, but the number of homeless and such didn't go up significantly, so they were finding options. I remember reading that some moved out of state specifically to get welfare elsewhere.
How about this. Make it really TOUGH to outsource -like say, if you build an offshore factory, it's illegal to import the products there produced back into the corporate host country.
Voila - end of offshoring WITHOUT removing the viability of local factories for big overseas markets.
Then what simply happens is that you get a seperate company to do it. A different company builds a factory in the cheap country, then starts importing the product. The in-country company ends up shuttering the factory because they can't compete.
Otherwise you're looking at tariffs and blockades, and those generally harm the country doing more than it does the foreign country; indeed it's worse all around.
Make labor law have REAL teeth. Set minimum wage to maximum welfare times 3. Declare that any business caught paying less than it, to anybody, ever for ANY job will immediately lose it's business license REGARDLESS OF ALL OTHER FACTORS and that INCLUDES if the workers are illegal immigrants. Same rule goes for safe working conditions etc.
Increasing minimum wage simply ensures that people who's labor is worth less than minimum wage don't get employed. I saw it when I was working around people getting close to minimum when it increased - stores economized more on labor. People got less in service. We went from toasting buns(and employing a person to do it) to buying 'pre-toasted'.
For other manufacturing, it'll increase the cost of the product and result in MORE outsourcing.
Illegal immigrants - we can't enforce the laws we have now, how is this going to help?
Personally, I take a different tact - get rid of the minimum wage, but pay welfare on a sliding scale.
Let's say welfare pays $10k if you have no job. Get a job earning $10k and your welfare drops to $7500, so you're now earning $17.5k, you're MUCH better off, whereas the current situation would have you now with a job earning $10k and NOT getting any welfare, thus you're actually better off on welfare.
Get a job earning $40k a year and your benefits completely cease, but at that point do you really care?
It would be even BETTER if there could be a U.N. resolution to that effect, which effectively makes it international law any country not enacting compliant legislation face guaranteed economic sanctions - 100% ban on trade unless your labor laws meet requirements...
Like the USA is going to sign off on something like this, much less China or India. Well, China might, but then just ignore it like they do so many other regulations. Technically China's environmental protection laws are more stringent than the USAs, but they more or less ignore them, thus they have worse air quality than the USA.
Generally, the jobs available to W2W paying so low that most people had to hold down TWO 8-hour-a-day jobs, meaning 16 hours a day of work just to qualify for wellfare
Then it wasn't structured correctly.
Personally, I'm mostly a libertarian. Paying welfare for people who could be working irks me something fierce.
Still, I don't want people starving on the streets or so desperate they turn to crime.
My first plot was simply to take welfare, and if you got a job reduce your benefits by 50% of what you earn. That way you always benefited. Then I learned a bit more about life and opportunity cost and such, so my plan has altered some. Especially with a low paying job 50% might not be enough to pay for the vehicle, gas, insurance, clothing, food, etc...
First, come up with a *MINIMUM* standard of living. It SHOULD be shitty, not include gamestations, cable TV, etc... That's the welfare level. One problem you can get here is that a Healthy Diet costs $$, while a unhealthy(but cheap) one can cost $, and people WILL chose the unhealthy to put the money elsewhere. This was part of the original reason to give out food stamps rather than cash.
Then, if somebody gets a job, decrease benefits by 1/4 to 1/5th the earnings. Be fairly generous with subsidizing education, but keep it real - one region I read about basically trained *EVERYONE* in the program to be welders; they oversaturated the market with welders, resulting in un and under employed welders. Still, you should be able to pick 'hot' job fields that need more people, just pay attention to how many you train. North Dakota might be able to do with a hundred or so extra wind turbine maintainers, but a couple thousand?
Unfortunately, if the demand for said "stuff" is finite,
Thus far the solution has been to eventually move the displaced workers into NEW fields; We might not need many buggy-whip makers anymore, but we need quite a few people making MP3 players today.
A car takes fewer man-hours to build; but there's still plenty of other things people want that could be built.
Derivatives are, at their core, a useful risk management device. The problem is that they ARE complicated products, but in the end they're a form of insurance and firms that offer them should be treated as such.
this system rewards people who produce nothing of value, make nothing, enrich no one's lives, do not create art, do not expand the sphere of human knowledge, and provide no meaningful service to humanity or the country.
This I'll agree with. Even commodity speculators add some value to the economy by providing price/availability stability. But what gain in productivity is there when you're making your money via trading that's not worth anything if it takes longer than 4 seconds? They're doing the equivalent of round down partial cents.
Personally, I'd shut this down by instituting a random 30 second delay in trading requests.
This would work for most people and I predict 90% of desktops will be SSD-only in about 2 years.
Call me a pessimist, but personally I figure that this will take at least 5-10 years. My 2 year figure would be for 50% of laptops being SSD, and I haven't seen any news of SSDs breaking double digit laptop penetration yet.
My reasonings for laptops: 2.5" Drives are more expensive per gig than 3.5", conserving power is a good thing for laptops, and shock resistance is a selling point - basically extra concerns give ssds more advantages in a laptop form factor, whereas in a desktop a few extra watts isn't going to kill you, shock isn't normally a worry, etc...
You're not going to see a 90% penetration until a basic SSD that meets requirements is cheaper than the cheapest HD that meets requirements. This will be difficult as long as manufacturers can get a 80GB HD for like $20.
Remember that for most people price is king, performance is secondary. Then look at that flash is currently like 20 times more expensive than HDs, and is only doubling in capacity per dollar between every 12-18 months. That's 5 doublings left to beat 'current' hard drives.
Once you can get, say, a 100 GB flash drive for cheaper than a 200 GB HD, then I figure the 'base line' units will switch over to SSD, with 'power users' simply installing an ancillary spinning platter - perhaps a 10TB unit?
I know quite a few 'less technically' inclined people running media servers today, downloading tons of HD video, etc... But I also know people who still haven't busted 8 gig, and windows updates take up more space than their my documents + extra installed programs.
It's more along the lines of something good from both worlds.
Sometimes this is better than getting the best of one.
For example, this sounds perfect for my 'games' drive. I tend to install a game, play it intensively for anywhere from a week to a couple months. After that, it tends to go on the backburner, but I might play it every other week or so.
Given the size of games today, I don't want to effectively be paying 50% more for the game to keep it installed on a SSD. It can be a pain in the butt to 'move' an installed program such as the game. I DO like the extra speed offered by SSD, but can put up with slower loads, especially for a game I haven't played in a while.
Heck, don't forget that it's not typical that all files installed are frequently accessed, whether it be game, os, or other program.
On a cost basis, I'd love to see a 3.5" version of this, 1-2 TB of storage, 8-16GB of SSD. Keep my OS and programs on the SSD, move my games to the new combination drive. Don't have to worry about doing file links to preserve my 64GB SSD.
4 GiB of RAM would still have to be filled up at boot, and flash is rounning around $2 a gig vs around $20 for RAM.
$.17 a gig for a 7200rpm laptop hard drive.
$2.23 a gig for a SSD
$19.50 a gig for the cheapest 2gig ram stick off of newegg.
Sure, RAM is a lot faster even now, but we're back to looking at various levels of cache - 10x the price for.
When you go looking at RAM, I'm going to say it's better off in the system, especially now that so many people are going to 64bit systems, and I've heard that Win7, possibly Vista will use excess RAM for caching. The hybrid drive proposed here is an interesting and I think well positioned device - nonvolatile cache means that the system doesn't have to worry about flushing a relatively huge 4gig of RAM to the disc in case of failure.
So I'm back to that I'd like to see a 'premium' product offering 8 or even 16 GB of flash for the 'caching' operation. That'd allow the commonly used parts of my OS, my most commonly used 2-3 applications, as well as the commonly used files for whatever game I'm playing.
Given the issues with installing STEAM games to different directories, for example, this as a secondary drive for my computer would allow me to install STEAM on it, enjoy my game of the month at (near)SSD speeds, the steam app itself would end up on the flash portion, but I wouldn't have to worry about flushing the game of last month off of the SSD, and I can still play it without downloading it or restoring it from backup if I want to.
I got hurt worse in just day to day activities.
Still, confrontations that go to 'broken bones' is far beyond the 'standard' bully.
Like any predator, you only have to make it not worth it to a bully. The old adage 'bullies are cowards' isn't necessarily 100% true, but most will perform the sort of risk assessment a predator has to do - The prey can risk any injury to survive; the predator still has to be able to hunt next week. They try to pick fights where they're unlikely to be injured. If the bully knows he has a good chance of getting a black eye or something from you, he's probably not going to risk it.
I used to get into a fight about once a year, word spread after that and I was left alone.
And I don't think this is just a big cache. I'm pretty sure hard drive caches disappear upon reboot.
Current caches disappear on loss of power because they use volatile ram.
If the file is still present on the spinning platter it's still a cache, just a non-volatile one, which is a good thing when it comes to speeding up boot times and such.
Performance is better than traditional drives in almost all benchmarks, and reaches up to 2x the performance when using commonly accessed files (like, the operating system).
I agree, and I think the 'different partitions' of the parent poster isn't as good of a system as an automatic cache system.
Consider that even for linux installs, not all system files are going to be equally read or written, same with applications and even data files. Some will be used almost all the time, some will collect virtual dust for years.
Newegg prices:
500 GB laptop drive: $65. 13 cents per gig
65 GB SSD: $145. $2.23 per gig. (Went 64GB to avoid small cap premium).
At around 6% of the cost, it's essentially 'free' to duplicate the SSD data on the actual platter. You're paying 52 cents for that 4GB on the platter, $8.92 for the SSD. That puts flash very much in the price range for cache - where you're willing to spend the money for the extra performance, but just can't afford to put everything on there.
I'm sure an 8GB version would make the geeks very happy, but I wouldn't be surprised if 90% of my most commonly accessed files would easily fit on 4GB. More is better, of course, but at 20x the price, how much 'more' is really better?
With smart caching, I wouldn't be surprised if doubling the storage had less than 10% difference in real world performance.
The main reason I'd want 8 or even 16GB is that I recently went to a SSD for my main computer and I LOVE the fast hybernate(and wake up). So there's 4 or eventually 8 GB right there for the hybernate file. Don't forget the whole GB vs GiB debate... Memory uses 'real' gigabytes, which means that you'll likely need 5GB as HD/SSD makers measure them...
Our intellectual property laws allow our economy to realize the value of intangibles, to the recipient of the intangible at the time that he realizes the value, and to the producer at the same time. That puts food on people's tables, clothes on their backs, roofs over their shoulders.
Indeed, one could argue that it was the European recognition of 'intellectual property' that ultimately resulted in the explosion of the machine age, followed by the information age. Before that you got all sorts of mechanical toys - but they were regarded as toys. The Romans, for example, had all the technology necessary for railroads, but they never developed them. Trade secrets were developed, lost, then developed again. It was inefficient.
Now, you don't want to lock stuff up for too long, and I do think that we need to go back to requiring an operational product for a patent, but on the whole, patents are a good thing.
That brings up another point - light synchronization and stop sign minimization. Think about how much gasoline could be saved if we concentrated not on stopping the engine while you're waiting on a red light, but on preventing you from having to stop in the first place?
Talk to the hyper-milers and see how much gas they can save doing 'rolling stops' through stop signs rather than coming to a complete halt.
Now, this would have to be carefully done to keep from increasing the accident rate, but I know of at least two stop signs that could be eliminated on my commute to work. Probably 3-4 if you simply switch to yield signs.
So, where's the Gates Foundation on this one? It seems a perfect avenue for them to do some good for humanity with only a small amount of money spent.
Getting money from the Gates Foundation is in many ways MORE difficult than getting a grant out of the government. The foundation still has limited amounts of money to give, you have to convince the Gates that your cause is worthy and doable.
With the limited, if large, amounts of money to give - there are plenty of worthy causes the Gates won't donate to because they're determined to donate in useful amounts.
A lot of places you donate to, 50% or more of your donation money goes towards soliciting more donations. It's a vicious circle. Bill was determined to avoid that.
So either the Gates have determined that this isn't quite worthy enough, that there's better projects to donate to, or they haven't applied to the Gates Foundation for money.
I know, but when you start getting into the larger cells the weight savings can be quite substantial; then there's also that Lithium polymer is much more flexible in shape than NiMH to reduce the volume cost. Another thing to consider is that NiMH tends to be around 66% efficient at charging, while LiIon is over 90%.
I'd go with Lithium Iron for any appliance I plan on using for more than 2-3 years even without the lower cost. They say that, on average, LiIron has equal capacity after a year, on average, more afer that.
It wouldn't be a bad thing if I could get another MP3 player that runs on a AA.
Let's see:
Laptop: Lithium - It's just too big.
Netbook: AA batteries; it'd be what, 4-8 of them? Preferably integrate a charger.
Flashlight, MP3 player, Bluetooth mouse/keyboard, Electric toothbrush(Effectiveness gains probably minimal; but it's 'funner'): AA, between 2-4
Then just pack a charger; preferably one that does individual cells, not pairs.
I like to avoid AAA because of the substantial energy cost for minimal volumne savings. C/D cells are too much of a pain to get 'real' rechargables for. 2400mAh vs 2200 for the AA.
But do you really think there aren't millions of voters that vote what someone told them to vote already?
I think the point is that while you can bribe voters all you like, they're still untrusted. Heck, bribery is less of a concern than blackmail/threats. With unverified voting, if you bribe me with $100, while I'm pretty likely to vote your way, I can still vote for the other party(How are you going to make that $100 back?). On the other hand, you can't really say 'If you don't vote for X you're fired/finding a new apartment/being beaten bloody/etc...'
You also have to figure that e-machines, being used only a couple times a year on average, have to be competitive with paper based systems as far as cost goes, while a ATM Machine has to be competitive with a teller(or three)'s salary spread over most of a decade.
Oh, and for whatever reason, Diebold didn't use the same people in the effort.
Gah.... You're right, and it's sad.
Still, I'll note that while I have some training in responding to biological, as well as chemical and radiological attacks, my first thought was the potential medical benefits of this test.
Antibiotics are getting tougher, we even have a number of anti-virals. They're all targeted, and you don't want to give somebody them if you don't have to. When it comes to bacteria, there's whole listings of phages - but they each target like 1 bacterial strain.
But when it comes to a bacterial infection, speed of treatment is a big deal - 24 hours can make a huge difference. Don't forget the time cost of getting the appropriate phage/anti-viral. I don't imagine that most pharmacies would want to stock 5k or so phages. So it'd be next day fed-ex'd or something. 48 hours until treatment starts, though I imagine 'common' strains would have hospitals/pharmacies/doctors having the appropriate strain on hand.
The problem you run into with netbooks and such is that LiIon has about double the energy density of NiMH. Now, in 'micro' applications the extra charging and protection circuitry reduces or even eliminates this advantage.
But in netbook and larger sizes, the added mass of the charging/protection circuitry is negligible, so you actually get better performance from the LiIon. You could probably make cell phones last quite a bit longer - but the form factor isn't quite right for AA cells - you'd have to make the phone thicker.
You pay quite a penalty for AAA.
Don't have a wireless keyboard, but my wireless mouse has some cheap NiMH cells in it that aren't low discharge. I'm too cheap right now to replace them. I have 4 batteries, two in the mouse, 2 in the charger. Mouse quits working right, I swap them.
As for usage - gaming, browsing, pretty much constant when I'm home.
What I have to wonder is just why you personally are worth the effort it would take to snipe your wireless keyboard and decrypt the bluetooth connection?
Thousands of dollars in bank accounts and investments?
With them using my actual passwords, I'm not likely to get my money back either.
With my training I know just how easy it is, I know it's vanishingly unlikely, but I can't help but be uneasy about it. Which is why I used the word 'paranoid'.
Should a wireless mouse be encrypted too?
Mainly worried about password sniffing; mouse only gives you xy data and clicks.
With online banking if somebody gets ahold of my passwords they can do a transfer of my assets - and I'm NOT guaranteed to get them back.
Personally, my 'range' is ~300 miles. Call it 350 to have a safety margin.
That takes around four hours. Eat at breakfast at 6, start driving at 7, stop at 11, eat lunch, drive from 1 to 5, eat dinner, drive another couple hours.
But yes, 75% accuracy is pretty terrible,
For this application. To reach the 99.9% court standard, we generally apply a number of different tests, all of which are less than 99.9% likely to be correct.
I wonder if you stick a guy in the MRI again the next day would you get a true 75% chance to be right this time, or if somebody who can fool it the first time is likely to fool it again?
Heck, what about combining this with the more traditional lie detector tests? Mythbusters actually rated the traditional test better for their limited not very scientific tests. (No fools vs 1 fool).
Heck, in my case I've bought games on Steam that I already owned, just because it was worth spending the $2.50 to not have to dig through my old CD stack to find the install disc.