According one show I saw recently, we've finished going through the spiral arm, and have just entered the period when the dinosaur killing comets are going to be coming through. Though I'd say the danger is short term in measurments of thousands of years.
As 9/11 happened to mostly civilian targets, it was more of an intellegence failure. Our intellegence agencies were also decimated during the Clinton administration. They missed the clues because they didn't have enough people or resources to track the leads that would have told them about what was planned.
After the attack, when we finally figured out what happened, then the military went into action to help prevent more attacks. Think about it, how many terrorist attacks have happened recently, outside of the desert? We've taken alot of their capability away from them.
And the only reason we can afford to keep flying them is because our fighter cover is so effective in suppressing defenses. Many countries are catching up with the effectivness of the F-15/F-16 which are the primary combat aircraft for the USAF. Add in that many of these aircraft, which suffer far higher stresses than the B-52, are older than their pilots, and you start having problems.
While your method cooling probably worked, I don't think that you got the temperatures you're quouting unless you're leaving out parts.
1. Without an AC unit or peltier, you can't really run a system below ambiant.
2. Comparing the temperatures of two totally different computers, in different building (I'm assuming), with different cooling methods won't tell you which cooling method is better. Maybe your friend's computer produced more heat than your 'old mobo'. Maybe his computer room was hotter. Who knows. And a ~200 rpm fan wouldn't be that loud unless there's something wrong with it.
I once bought a game and it turned out the whole pressing was unusable due to the copy protection put on it. I think it was outpost 2. Why bother? This was one of the straight to $9.99 games. I'm sure it ended up costing them a bunch of money, because their standard license terms forced them to re-press the disks and not simply have a recall.
Some studios, software companies, and other businesses have figured out that copy protection has a highter TCO than releasing unprotected. One studio did an efficiency study for macrovision. Because things like macrovision cost money per unit, and the studio determined that macrovision prevented somewhere between zip and zero copies, they dropped it as an 'unnessisary expense'. Oh, and they also figured out that sharing of DIVX'd versions of their DVD's increased sales.
Actually, having the same replacement cost is a good thing, because they're trying to argue it's the cost of replacing the CD, without profit. They have to do this to get away with the 'you bought a license for this software, not the software' line.
If you lay power lines, you might as well run fiber.
As for local generation, there's not enough sunlight for solar ~6 months of the year (and somebody would have to regularly clear off the panels), diesel/gas engines don't work well in temperatures that cold, and I don't know about the wind situation. It's just cheaper to run a shielded cable containing everything you need alongside the path they're bulldozing.
I know how that goes. I'm in North Dakota, and our AC broke. -15F weather, and we have the doors open, fans blowing in, and it's still hot enough to sweat in. Of course, we have a service department that CAN'T hang up on us (or we call our boss to call their boss). Your provider must not be used to large buildings (skyscrapers always need AC) and network centers.
Except in cloning you're making no attempt to isolate genes, you're trying to transfer all the genetic material. They've been choosing females because they're easier to clone (no tissue rejection when the fetus is implanted in the source of the DNA).
What suprised me was the missing colors, the mother was a three color (brown, tan, gold)calico, while CC is white with gray strips.
A different pattern wouldn't suprise me, after all, twins don't have the same fingerprints. But I'd have expected them to at least have the same hair colors...
I guess this means that the colors of cats depends more on development/womb conditions than genetics.
HH was written before the speed of gravity was determined (and I still have some questions as to their proof), so it was written to the knowledge of the time. As such David Weber is now forced to essentially say "The physical laws of the HH universe differ slightly from the real universe." This isn't putting him into the space fantasy realm so much as it simply outdates him.
A number of Asimov books suffer from these problems, as he'd make conjectures about the universe, or use 'known' scientific facts, only to have his books become 'science fantasy' as more about the solar system and physics was discovered. For example, the space ranger series he wrote under an assumed name was rendered "obsolete" in under a year as new facts about the planets became known.
1) There are regions that are clear better than 99% of the time. They're generally called deserts.
2) Buried Superconducting power lines, anybody?
3) Bury them. See number 2, which are installed underground anyways. After a certain distance, you'd hook them up to the existing power lines.
4) Build in a stable area. Because of #1, you aren't building it in hurricane or hail area, and tornado's aren't very likely either. And if it's in an earthquake area, you just build the stems in a way to resist earthquakes. It's not like you're build skyscrapers here, and you can (want) to build each panel a fair ways apart (at least for mirror arrays, they need a path to the central tower)
I've seen images of a few mirror + central tower generation plants. The mirrors are computer controled to reflect light to a central tower, converting water to steam to power turbines. Solar power this way is a definate option, as you can build lasting mirrors.
But that's not using waves as such. That's more of a morse-code on-off binary system. If you postulate a device capable of artificially producing gravity and sensors capable of determining location of faint changes in gravity (which we're allowing as this is sci-fi), you can communicate in a pulse code system. Just like flags, telegraph, smoke, and lights/mirrors.
The only assumption is that gravity propagates instantly, at least in the Honor Harrington universe. I say it makes no use of wave theory because it doesn't attempt to use modulation, just states. It was initially just on-off in the the order of minutes per byte, the fastest the device could cycle. Still usefull for pre-planned messages, but very limited. Later I believe they refined the tech to a hundred baud or so. Perhaps using a multiple state system (off, level 1, 2, 3, 4 etc). This would be much more complicated, but given a slow cycle, and massive computing power in comparison, it might work better.
So you're doing 40 units of wear on the roads a day at a rate of 1 unit/mile (guessing about 20 miles to work). If you were driving some huge truck or SUV, you might be doing 80 units of wear each day, because you're doing 2 units/mile, due to the increased weight. But with the gas tax, you'll be paying for the increased wear because you're using about twice as much gas. Increased fuel efficiency can be accounted for by increasing the tax on fuels (penalizing pollution/inefficiency to an extent). If people significantly (I.E. around 1% or so) start 'avoiding' the road taxes by moving to non-petrol fuels (electric, hydrogen, nat. gas), consider an alternate taxation method for those people.
Requiring a gps system in cars would just be another expensive system. And what would they charge when it 'breaks'? Charge you a standard fee? I'd see high-mileage people 'breaking' the gps system fairly frequently. Charging an extreme fee might be seen as illegal, a punitive measure for what's simply an overcomplicated and required meter that broke without fault to the owner.
Libraries are a wonderful institution that doubtlessly cut into the income of those who produce the books
Actually, there are good arguments that libraries help sell books. It's the try before you buy theory. Baen has demonstrated that offering ebooks for free, in an open format (Baen Free Library)
improves sales of the physical version by a significant amount. It also increases the sales of the book series and the Author's other novels.
Baen has concluded that the reason that ebooks hasn't taken off very well is the very restrictions placed on them, as well as the fact that most of them cost as much as a hardcover.
Instead you can buy access to their published books (done by initial publishing month since 1999, with some variations). Five books for fifteen dollars is $3.00 per book, and you can get the whole book two weeks before the hardcover comes out in stores. You can read them online or download them in 5 easy formats (HTML,RTF,rocketbook,microsoft reader, palm/Psion), at any time. As I read fanfiction quite a bit, I'm used to reading from a computer screen (actually a bit easier than books with my vision).
Overall, much easier than my one experience with locked ebooks, when I downloaded the free book from Steven King to try it. I had to download a propriatary reader, (which caused all sorts of system faults on my computer) which wouldn't let me change the font or size of the text, and was otherwise such a pain in the butt, that I ended up deleting the book and uninstalling the software.
I find I prefer HTML (with jacket art and any internal art), or RTF (no art). And its really nice to be able to haul around 60 books on my laptop rather than try to physically lug 10-12 books around (along with my laptop).
And this is where the Library charges the person to replace the book... Part of the agreement for checking books out is not to damage them, and to return them within a set period of time (or be charged late fees). A more accurate view would be a book so popular that it wears out.
And according to what I read, they were still willing to fight after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it was only the Russions starting to threaten them from the west, and the Emperor retaking control from the military that allowed them to surrender.
The issue of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a centerpoint of revisionist history. The Japanese were ready to surrender, they weren't. They wanted assurance that we wouldn't kill their Emperor. Did President Truman know this or not? It's a hotspot for people questioning the usage of nuclear weapons.
There's still two devices per channel, but no longer two devices per cable. These connectors come in pairs. There's actually fairly simple connectors that can convert between P-ATA and S-ATA
It's when you 'know' that the majority of the message is text (a-z,A-Z,1-9), and can find the code from the wasted bits. I.E. 8 bit cryptostream, 7 bit messagestream. Certain letters in the alphabet are used more often. If you know the keysize, that helps(alot). Like with 56 bit encryption, you'd look at every 7th character. Try to figure out the bits of key that transforms most or all to plaintext. Move down one character and repeat. Then you start looking at permutations, and hopefully you soon have the message. That's why a good crypto system would compress or otherwise render a 7 bit stream into a 8 bit one.
Also, the plane could only hit a few miles up. The 'elevator' is more a suspended rope. All they'd have to do would be to extend the cable down further. This would probably also be done for 'routine maintenance'.
1) Authors can wave it at anytime before it expires (and this does happen a lot, just check out the
baen free library[baen.com]).
WRONG! The copywrite is still maintained for the books on the baen library. Essentially, they're giving away free [electronic] copies. They can still string you up to dry if you try to print your own edition of any of the books on there anytime during the next ~90 years.
Copywrite holders can enter works into the public domain, and often do, but the baen free library does not consist of public works.
Not really, because they had expired 19 years before, prior to the first extension. Before the extension in 1978, everything produced before 1921 became public domain. 1922 did expire in 1997, but nothing has been 'forcibly' expired since. And I'm not even sure about that.
Nope, it takes at least a letter. A phone call can't really be proved (by you). A letter is what's required for notification by law. I sent a letter out when my card was compromised. Discover actually gave out my number to the wife of a guy with my same name. Never had to pay beyond the ~50 cents the letter/paper/stamp. But send a letter!
American Labor Timeline This does say that the move towards 8 hour days started in the 1880's. Ford didn't go to 8 hour days until 1914. But his company wasn't started until 1903. The assembly line started only in 1913. It was the assembly line that increased production enough that it made sense for Ford enough clout to cut hours.
Not discounting the deaths/beatings/other stuff, Ford was a pioneer for the forty hour week.
1. Well, can't say much about the windows only, but I'm sure somebody could write a tool to take a directory of raw images and convert them to the format you want.
2. I've noticed that the jpgs from digital cameres (work and home) aren't very well compressed. I can often chop file size by half or more by recompressing. With no noticable loss of quality. There's nothing wrong with Recompressing images again after downloading them, is there? And there's plenty of automation for that.
The idea is to keep as much resolution as possible until you get a smart compresser to compress it.
Slashdot Mirror
According one show I saw recently, we've finished going through the spiral arm, and have just entered the period when the dinosaur killing comets are going to be coming through. Though I'd say the danger is short term in measurments of thousands of years.
As 9/11 happened to mostly civilian targets, it was more of an intellegence failure. Our intellegence agencies were also decimated during the Clinton administration. They missed the clues because they didn't have enough people or resources to track the leads that would have told them about what was planned.
After the attack, when we finally figured out what happened, then the military went into action to help prevent more attacks. Think about it, how many terrorist attacks have happened recently, outside of the desert? We've taken alot of their capability away from them.
And the only reason we can afford to keep flying them is because our fighter cover is so effective in suppressing defenses. Many countries are catching up with the effectivness of the F-15/F-16 which are the primary combat aircraft for the USAF.
Add in that many of these aircraft, which suffer far higher stresses than the B-52, are older than their pilots, and you start having problems.
While your method cooling probably worked, I don't think that you got the temperatures you're quouting unless you're leaving out parts.
1. Without an AC unit or peltier, you can't really run a system below ambiant.
2. Comparing the temperatures of two totally different computers, in different building (I'm assuming), with different cooling methods won't tell you which cooling method is better. Maybe your friend's computer produced more heat than your 'old mobo'. Maybe his computer room was hotter. Who knows. And a ~200 rpm fan wouldn't be that loud unless there's something wrong with it.
I once bought a game and it turned out the whole pressing was unusable due to the copy protection put on it. I think it was outpost 2. Why bother? This was one of the straight to $9.99 games. I'm sure it ended up costing them a bunch of money, because their standard license terms forced them to re-press the disks and not simply have a recall.
Some studios, software companies, and other businesses have figured out that copy protection has a highter TCO than releasing unprotected. One studio did an efficiency study for macrovision. Because things like macrovision cost money per unit, and the studio determined that macrovision prevented somewhere between zip and zero copies, they dropped it as an 'unnessisary expense'. Oh, and they also figured out that sharing of DIVX'd versions of their DVD's increased sales.
Actually, having the same replacement cost is a good thing, because they're trying to argue it's the cost of replacing the CD, without profit. They have to do this to get away with the 'you bought a license for this software, not the software' line.
And how would you power the RF towers?
If you lay power lines, you might as well run fiber.
As for local generation, there's not enough sunlight for solar ~6 months of the year (and somebody would have to regularly clear off the panels), diesel/gas engines don't work well in temperatures that cold, and I don't know about the wind situation. It's just cheaper to run a shielded cable containing everything you need alongside the path they're bulldozing.
I know how that goes. I'm in North Dakota, and our AC broke. -15F weather, and we have the doors open, fans blowing in, and it's still hot enough to sweat in. Of course, we have a service department that CAN'T hang up on us (or we call our boss to call their boss). Your provider must not be used to large buildings (skyscrapers always need AC) and network centers.
Except in cloning you're making no attempt to isolate genes, you're trying to transfer all the genetic material. They've been choosing females because they're easier to clone (no tissue rejection when the fetus is implanted in the source of the DNA).
What suprised me was the missing colors, the mother was a three color (brown, tan, gold)calico, while CC is white with gray strips.
A different pattern wouldn't suprise me, after all, twins don't have the same fingerprints. But I'd have expected them to at least have the same hair colors...
I guess this means that the colors of cats depends more on development/womb conditions than genetics.
HH was written before the speed of gravity was determined (and I still have some questions as to their proof), so it was written to the knowledge of the time. As such David Weber is now forced to essentially say "The physical laws of the HH universe differ slightly from the real universe." This isn't putting him into the space fantasy realm so much as it simply outdates him.
A number of Asimov books suffer from these problems, as he'd make conjectures about the universe, or use 'known' scientific facts, only to have his books become 'science fantasy' as more about the solar system and physics was discovered. For example, the space ranger series he wrote under an assumed name was rendered "obsolete" in under a year as new facts about the planets became known.
1) There are regions that are clear better than 99% of the time. They're generally called deserts.
2) Buried Superconducting power lines, anybody?
3) Bury them. See number 2, which are installed underground anyways. After a certain distance, you'd hook them up to the existing power lines.
4) Build in a stable area. Because of #1, you aren't building it in hurricane or hail area, and tornado's aren't very likely either. And if it's in an earthquake area, you just build the stems in a way to resist earthquakes. It's not like you're build skyscrapers here, and you can (want) to build each panel a fair ways apart (at least for mirror arrays, they need a path to the central tower)
I've seen images of a few mirror + central tower generation plants. The mirrors are computer controled to reflect light to a central tower, converting water to steam to power turbines. Solar power this way is a definate option, as you can build lasting mirrors.
But that's not using waves as such. That's more of a morse-code on-off binary system.
If you postulate a device capable of artificially producing gravity and sensors capable of determining location of faint changes in gravity (which we're allowing as this is sci-fi), you can communicate in a pulse code system. Just like flags, telegraph, smoke, and lights/mirrors.
The only assumption is that gravity propagates instantly, at least in the Honor Harrington universe. I say it makes no use of wave theory because it doesn't attempt to use modulation, just states. It was initially just on-off in the the order of minutes per byte, the fastest the device could cycle. Still usefull for pre-planned messages, but very limited. Later I believe they refined the tech to a hundred baud or so. Perhaps using a multiple state system (off, level 1, 2, 3, 4 etc). This would be much more complicated, but given a slow cycle, and massive computing power in comparison, it might work better.
So you're doing 40 units of wear on the roads a day at a rate of 1 unit/mile (guessing about 20 miles to work).
If you were driving some huge truck or SUV, you might be doing 80 units of wear each day, because you're doing 2 units/mile, due to the increased weight. But with the gas tax, you'll be paying for the increased wear because you're using about twice as much gas. Increased fuel efficiency can be accounted for by increasing the tax on fuels (penalizing pollution/inefficiency to an extent).
If people significantly (I.E. around 1% or so) start 'avoiding' the road taxes by moving to non-petrol fuels (electric, hydrogen, nat. gas), consider an alternate taxation method for those people.
Requiring a gps system in cars would just be another expensive system. And what would they charge when it 'breaks'? Charge you a standard fee? I'd see high-mileage people 'breaking' the gps system fairly frequently. Charging an extreme fee might be seen as illegal, a punitive measure for what's simply an overcomplicated and required meter that broke without fault to the owner.
Actually, there are good arguments that libraries help sell books. It's the try before you buy theory. Baen has demonstrated that offering ebooks for free, in an open format (Baen Free Library) improves sales of the physical version by a significant amount. It also increases the sales of the book series and the Author's other novels.
Baen has concluded that the reason that ebooks hasn't taken off very well is the very restrictions placed on them, as well as the fact that most of them cost as much as a hardcover.
Instead you can buy access to their published books (done by initial publishing month since 1999, with some variations). Five books for fifteen dollars is $3.00 per book, and you can get the whole book two weeks before the hardcover comes out in stores. You can read them online or download them in 5 easy formats (HTML,RTF,rocketbook,microsoft reader, palm/Psion), at any time. As I read fanfiction quite a bit, I'm used to reading from a computer screen (actually a bit easier than books with my vision).
Overall, much easier than my one experience with locked ebooks, when I downloaded the free book from Steven King to try it. I had to download a propriatary reader, (which caused all sorts of system faults on my computer) which wouldn't let me change the font or size of the text, and was otherwise such a pain in the butt, that I ended up deleting the book and uninstalling the software.
I find I prefer HTML (with jacket art and any internal art), or RTF (no art). And its really nice to be able to haul around 60 books on my laptop rather than try to physically lug 10-12 books around (along with my laptop).
And this is where the Library charges the person to replace the book... Part of the agreement for checking books out is not to damage them, and to return them within a set period of time (or be charged late fees). A more accurate view would be a book so popular that it wears out.
And according to what I read, they were still willing to fight after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it was only the Russions starting to threaten them from the west, and the Emperor retaking control from the military that allowed them to surrender.
The issue of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a centerpoint of revisionist history. The Japanese were ready to surrender, they weren't. They wanted assurance that we wouldn't kill their Emperor. Did President Truman know this or not? It's a hotspot for people questioning the usage of nuclear weapons.
There's still two devices per channel, but no longer two devices per cable. These connectors come in pairs. There's actually fairly simple connectors that can convert between P-ATA and S-ATA
It's when you 'know' that the majority of the message is text (a-z,A-Z,1-9), and can find the code from the wasted bits.
I.E. 8 bit cryptostream, 7 bit messagestream. Certain letters in the alphabet are used more often. If you know the keysize, that helps(alot). Like with 56 bit encryption, you'd look at every 7th character.
Try to figure out the bits of key that transforms most or all to plaintext. Move down one character and repeat. Then you start looking at permutations, and hopefully you soon have the message. That's why a good crypto system would compress or otherwise render a 7 bit stream into a 8 bit one.
Also, the plane could only hit a few miles up. The 'elevator' is more a suspended rope. All they'd have to do would be to extend the cable down further. This would probably also be done for 'routine maintenance'.
WRONG! The copywrite is still maintained for the books on the baen library. Essentially, they're giving away free [electronic] copies. They can still string you up to dry if you try to print your own edition of any of the books on there anytime during the next ~90 years.
Copywrite holders can enter works into the public domain, and often do, but the baen free library does not consist of public works.
Not really, because they had expired 19 years before, prior to the first extension. Before the extension in 1978, everything produced before 1921 became public domain. 1922 did expire in 1997, but nothing has been 'forcibly' expired since. And I'm not even sure about that.
Nope, it takes at least a letter. A phone call can't really be proved (by you). A letter is what's required for notification by law. I sent a letter out when my card was compromised. Discover actually gave out my number to the wife of a guy with my same name. Never had to pay beyond the ~50 cents the letter/paper/stamp. But send a letter!
Henry Ford appears to have been a great proponent of the 40 hour work week. He actually looked at the economics of the work levels.
HENRY FORD: Why I Favor Five Days' Work With Six Days' Pay
Ford Timeline
American Labor Timeline This does say that the move towards 8 hour days started in the 1880's. Ford didn't go to 8 hour days until 1914. But his company wasn't started until 1903. The assembly line started only in 1913. It was the assembly line that increased production enough that it made sense for Ford enough clout to cut hours.
Not discounting the deaths/beatings/other stuff, Ford was a pioneer for the forty hour week.
1. Well, can't say much about the windows only, but I'm sure somebody could write a tool to take a directory of raw images and convert them to the format you want.
2. I've noticed that the jpgs from digital cameres (work and home) aren't very well compressed. I can often chop file size by half or more by recompressing. With no noticable loss of quality. There's nothing wrong with Recompressing images again after downloading them, is there? And there's plenty of automation for that.
The idea is to keep as much resolution as possible until you get a smart compresser to compress it.