And why can't they achieve this by posting you a discount coupon (off the cost of a new cartridge) for every returned empty cartridge?
Because that business model wouldn't work either. Remember, they're trying to stop the practice of sending the carts off to a third party who refills them.
So, I can get a recycled cart for $30 less than the price of a new one, or I can pay even less than that to a third party to refill (and thus essentially recycle) my existing cartridge... Hmmm...
See the problem? Their model doesn't work any way you look at it.
I gather that I'm amongst a real nine-to-fiver crowd, here. The assumption must be that I've never touched a computer in my life, or something. Well, folks, I'm telling you what *I* know about.
And they're telling you that know, you don't. Despite all your prattling on about graphics and 3d and such, you missed the point.
Go ahead, make your game. Then when it sucks, you'll understand what everybody is talking about. The graphics ain't what makes the game. The sound ain't what makes the game. The story, the scenery, the cohesion, the plot.. these make the game. Myst was good because it was one of the first of its type and because it had a decent story attached to it that was actually interesting and tied all the bits together.
Like somebody above said, just because you have OpenOffice doesn't mean you can write a bestseller.
Can someone out there please give a clear and succinct explanation to this whole encryption scheme?
Sure. The gist of it is that you put your video file on a web server. Then you put what is basically an INI file on a webserver as well. People download the INI (renamed to an NSC extension), their media player fires up, reads the INI, finds the location of the media file, and starts downloading and playing it.
But then anybody could load and parse that INI and get your media file. So they obfuscated the INI file by changing the important bits of it to be what looks like nonsense.
This obfuscation works by shifting all the text into it's hexadecimal equivalent, performing some fairly minor math to shift those numbers into some other numbers, and then spitting out the hex as text. Couple other bits are added on to the beginning though... it uses a couple of different encoding types, and a length field to tell you how much data there is, but that's the gist of it.
It's not actually "encryption" because there's no actual key used. It's about as much encryption as ROT13 is, it's just a little more complicated than that.
Giving up one proprietary format for another is stupid - the end of this will be lots of licences bought in Adobe Acrobat software, with little or no effect for open source.
Just because PDF can be read by virtually everyone, it is not an "open" file format. In fact, PDF is "protected" by several patents and some options are a well-kept secret of Adobe.
While you are correct that Adobe controls the PDF spec and it is not open in that sense, it is free as in beer, and anybody can use/implement the specification without Adobe's permission. They give their explicit permission to do so in the PDF references: http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/pdf/ind ex_reference.html
As for some options being "well-kept secrets", please clarify what you're talking about, as the PDF spec is offical, given out by Adobe themselves, and pretty damned comprehensive.
The OpenOffice format is definitely open source, so I assume you were not referring to it in any way.
You can't have it both ways - does a set of data get removed when all user-defined meta-data gets removed or not?
You never specified "user-defined" metadata before now. You just said metadata. The answer to this question is "no", but that's not the same question you asked in the first place.
Removing the blob of data and all references to it.
How does a user distinguish between "remove an association from the blob of data" vs "remove this blob of data altogether". Should the blob automatically delete when you remove all metadata around it?
Yes, removing all references to the blob auto deletes the blob. Much like removing all references to a file (inode) on a unix system deletes the file.
If so, would you really want data vanishing just because you removed a keyword?
What about all the other metadata associated with a file? Creation date? Last modified time? Last accessed time? Filetype? Not all metadata is "keywords".
There's enough automatically gathered metadata to ensure that accidentally deleting blobs of data isn't going to be particularly easy to do.
What does partial backup look like on a system?
The blobs of data and the metadata associated to those blobs. But backups would more likely be along the lines of time based, where all the data changed since the last backup was backed up. Much like you'd back up a database system now.
How can you have a combination of partial backups and know you have a whole?
How can you know that with existing backup systems? There's not a lot of fundamental differences here.
I can do that with a set of five directories. Let's say you tag a set of files with "project fred". But one small file, that you almost never care about, gets tagged with "project ferd". What good is the ol' Fred backup now?
Let's say you have a set of files in a directory structure. But one file you almost never use gets moved, accidentally, elsewhere. Then you backup the directory structure. What good is the backup now?
Some problems (user error) cannot be fixed.
At some core level these blobs of data that users place on a system need ONE meaningful location where they always "are". You need someplace where the file will always be, no matter what other associations you remove. You need somewhere you know it will be to assure yourself EVERYTHING you care about is backed up or moved between systems.
Like I said, there's going to be other metadata than user entered metadata. Hell, at the very least the data chunks would be enumerated in some fashion, providing a static reference to them.
But some things simply never take off because in practice they are not practical, and the filesystem as a full-fledged database with no default structure is one of those things.
Again, where are you getting "no default structure" from? Of course there's a default structure. It's just not hierarchical in nature. Hierarchy is built onto the default structure anyway (location of the file on disk), so building a database on top of that same default structure is not particularly difficult. Integrating this sort of thing into the OS is the harder part.
It's most distinguishing feature was a built in shopping cart that docked into a receptacle in the rear.
Yeah, that is a *very* good idea. I would pay damned good money for a shopping cart with a well made set of rollers and collapsible legs that I could easily get into my trunk.
I live in an apartment, and taking groceries up the elevator and down some long halls is rather inconvienent. If I could take a cart into the store, shop, toss the cart, still loaded, into the trunk, then drive home and roll the cart upstairs, it would be well worth whatever the cost of the cart would be, for me.
You'd be boiling the soup in the outer cans before you got enough power to the tags on the inner items to energize them.
Heh. I don't know if you can stack cans to form a good enough cage to block the extremely small amounts of power that would need to be received by the RFID tag to fire off a burst.
Never had that problem. Generally the only people I see using those are single people, usually with baskets.
Now, I don't shop at Wal-Mart, at all, for anything, period. I simply will not support such an abhorrent company.
But, when I was in a Wal-Mart recently with somebody else, I saw that their self-checkout stations were a bit different than any I'd seen elsewhere, as they actually had conveyor belts and such on them. So you may be correct as far as Wal-Mart self-checkout lanes go.
Gee, some supermarkets only changed a few years ago: until then the girls at the cash registers had to memorize product codes for over 600 products.
While I am aware that barcodes have been implemented in my lifetime, I've never seen any grocery store in the United States not using them. Not one. I don't doubt they exist, but even when I was a very little kid, barcodes were used at the supermarkets. Every mom and pop store has a barcode scanner. They may only have the one, and it may be handheld, but they have it.
Walk into Best Buy/COSTCO/Fry's with a blocker, and...... get stopped on the way out the door by the guard there who wants to see your receipt and compare it to the thousands in merchandise that you're holding?
I mean, I dunno about the eating habits of Americans, but where I'm from we also buy fruit and vege's at the supermarket. How do they RFID those?
For prepackaged items, they stick an RFID sticker on the thing. For bag your own type of things, they have a few options: -Weighing stations in the produce section that will spit out a tag for your items using printable conductive ink to make an RFID sticker, or -Same thing with a barcode which you scan instead (I've seen these in some places, they're very nice), or -A station at the checkout much like the self-checkouts are now, where you simply weigh each type of item in turn and select it on the touchscreen.
Use your imagination, and think of it as a station where your cart is scanned instead of a "walking through the door" type of scan. Because stores ain't going to be putting all their faith in any automated checkout system, and the door scanner idea, while nice, is just not going to happen.
Really all check out lines will be eliminated. Just walk out the store and you get charged. Shoplift prevention and checkout killed with 1 stone--brilliant.
Too many fundamental problems with it. RFID can be easily defeated by simply wrapping the product in tinfoil or some other conductive material.
No, what will happen will be the checkout lane gets a scanning device, much like the scanners that prevent shoplifting now using those magnetic sticky tabs. The scanner will let you roll an entire cart into it and it will scan it, taking a short time to do so (not on an as you roll through basis). After it's done, you will pay for your cart of stuff with a credit card or what have you, then the gate opens and you roll right on through the scanner.
and soon the checkout line lies fallow along with the "self checkout" lines which I seldom see operating nowadays.
Great, more room for me. As somebody who uses the self-checkout all the time, I love it. No more waiting behind some mom trying to buy two shopping carts full of goods while controlling 3 kids.:)
In reality, the checkout monkey will have to dig through all your crap to verify that the RFID worked, and...
No doubt, until they get it working well, much like the self-checkout lines do now. Haven't used them in a while? Might be worth trying again.
The reasoning I heard was that while incredibly cheap, RFID tags are alot more expensive then simply printing a bar-code on a box that you are already printing.
Yes. For the moment, you're right.
Of course, the concept of printing an RFID circuit using conductive ink is not really a new one either.
It's technology depreciation, man. New tech is expensive. Older tech isn't.
With RFID, there is the possibly of doing entire cart checkouts. Roll the cart into the scanning area, it gets all the RFID info, gives a total and you pay for your items. No need to remove everything from the cart.
Of course, this means that you likely want to bag the items as you shop instead of afterwards.
If you had suggested banning cars and substituing electric trolley cars, then I could see your argument, but horses are not a feasible option, and electric trolley cars are.
And where do you get the electricity to run all these trolley cars? Unless you've got some magical source of clean power, you're just blowing smoke. Literally, you're blowing smoke from coal power plants into the atmosphere. Oh, you do know that most of the country's power places are run on coal, don't you?
This doesn't even consider the energy involved in taking a medium sized city and reworking it to be entirely trolley-car (or other electric transportation) based. Or the energy needed to replace all those coal plants with something not spewing pollutants into the air...
A conversion to an economy with a minimal impact on CO2 would not be easy, but it actually would be feasible
At a rough guesstimate, I figure it would take somewhere between 75 to 100 years to complete, with everybody working on it full time. That's to eliminate fossil fuels and coal and such entirely.
And the Mojave desert, e.g., has enough potential solar power for most of the country, and North Dakota has enough potential wind power. (And yes, there are feasible ways to store it....
Unfortunately, there's no feasible ways to transport it. Power lines don't run across the country. It doesn't work that way. Maximum distance you can transmit electricity efficently is only in the few hundreds of miles, and that's not as the bird flies but as the length of the wire from end to end. Do you want everybody to move out west or something?
All that said, it would be a challenge. But don't claim that it's impossible...that just shows you have blinders on. Were I inclined, I could point to a lot of problems with the scenario I suggest. This doen't mean it's impossible, it means it's difficult.
I agree, but I think you haven't actually sat down and worked out exactly how difficult you're talking about here. I mean, you're suggesting that we completely rebuild something like 65% of the country, roughly.
In defense of recycling, it can save companies a good bit of money if done properly, which at least makes some people happy.
In one case (that being aluminum), you're correct. It's a hell of a lot cheaper to recycle aluminum than it is to mine the stuff out of bauxite and such.
In every other case, however, you're wrong. It doesn't save money, at best it's a break even proposition. More to the point, recycling is usually much, much less energy efficent than creating new products, and it usually is more harmful to the environment than creating the new product would be in the first place, when you consider the whole system.
Nature has a great recycling system already in place. It works, it's energy efficent, it's as environmentall friendly as you can get. Yeah, okay, it takes a few hundred thousand years for some items, but for the most part, it's probably the better way to go. It's called simply throwing the trash away and letting the bacteria have at it. Okay, so there's a bit more complications than that, but land fills aren't that hard to make, and quite frankly there is no shortage of land to fill anyway.
Recycling is a near total failure. It's not worth it on most any level. The levels where it is worth it, well, like you said, companies can save money that way. So they will. The problem is an economic one and like most economic problems, it tends to sort itself out.
Sometimes I get the sense from the Slashdot crowd that something isn't worth doing because perfection is impossible, perfect security being a prime example. I would like to ask, does that mean we quit using security measures? Do the people that say that leave their cars, homes and possessions unlocked? It would seem that is the logical conclusion of such an argument.
No, the real logical conclusion is that you should evaluate security as you would evaluate anything else: cost vs. benefit.
Is it worth it to lock your car? Sure. The cost of locking it is so near zero that any security benefits it provides are well worth it.
But a lot of computer security measures really only serve to make it harder for people to do things the right way and don't add any real security for those who want to bypass it. Take DRM as a prime example. The current DRM schemes used by Apple and Microsoft make it difficult for people to load their purchased music onto their own purchased music playing devices, but do nothing as far as keeping the music off the file sharing networks. The costs are higher than the benefits.
Asus A8N. 8 SATA drive connections + 4 IDE's = 12 drives possible, without any additional cards (and it has 4 or 5 PCI slots, IIRC). And both of the two sets of 4 SATA connectors can do hardware RAID.
It's getting more than a little ridiculous in terms of the number of drives the things can support these days. The freakin' thing came with a card slot panel to fit on the back of the case, which takes two SATA connectors and a power connector. The idea being that you can attach internal SATA drives to the system without opening the case, presumably for transferring stuff on the go.:D
I think the game companies would be better served in writing their games such that the gameplay doesn't require a lot of repetative (and thus easily scripted) actions in order to advance in the game, instead of trying to "fine" their own customers.
The problem with a lot of MMORPGs is that a significant amount of time is spent gathering gold/experience/points in order to level up or otherwise build up your character to higher levels. While this does serve to keep the player playing for a long time (and thus to keep that subscription money rolling in), it's basically just gruntwork. Inventing something new may be difficult, but in the long run it might make for a better gaming experience all around.
The only way to accomplish this is to: -Not allow any trading of items between characters -Not allow characters to drop items or pick up items dropped by other characters -Not allow characters to sell items to shops and have those items then be buyable by other characters...
Essentially, if there's any way for me to take, say, a Sword of Justice, and have us perform some sequence of events that causes you to have the Sword of Justice and me not to have it, then I can sell the thing to you.
Whole organizations sprung up around trading of virtual items when that wasn't originally part of the game. As long as I can give something to you, then we can work out payment and other stuff like that offline.
As for selling of characters, there is NO way to prevent this, as I can simply sell you my account name and password and such.
Rule #2 should be anyone who uses a bot would be fined a large sum of money, something like $1000.
Good luck collecting that. Private entities cannot "fine" people and expect it to be enforced on anything other than a voluntary basis.
Well I don't know about "millions of people," though I suspect you can't find a single podcast with a million subscribers...
Probably not, no, but there's easily more than a couple million who do listen to podcasts in general....but by that definition slashdot itself used to have a podcast with its "Geeks in Space" radio show that was distributed as an MP3 (not a stream) and was episodic, etc. etc. etc.: every quality you gave to define "podcast" except for the RSS stream. So I don't think those are defining qualities of a podcast
I disagree. Geeks in Space (which I did listen to once or twice) was basically a podcast before it became known as such or commonplace enough to define standards for it. They were ahead of their time, in some respects.
A bunch of things had to come together for the notion to become popular and widespread though. Portable MP3 players had to get big thus causing people to want new content. Easy to create standards like XML had to be made so that other standards, like RSS, could be written using them. And so on.....podcast is just an audio file obtained by a link from an RSS stream. It isn't just a rebranding of an old term but it certainly isn't a revolutionary thing.
The fact that people are actually listening to these podcasts and that it's large and widespread is what is the revolutionary thing. The tech involved is, indeed, nothing special.
Slashdot Mirror
And why can't they achieve this by posting you a discount coupon (off the cost of a new cartridge) for every returned empty cartridge?
Because that business model wouldn't work either. Remember, they're trying to stop the practice of sending the carts off to a third party who refills them.
So, I can get a recycled cart for $30 less than the price of a new one, or I can pay even less than that to a third party to refill (and thus essentially recycle) my existing cartridge... Hmmm...
See the problem? Their model doesn't work any way you look at it.
These days, any one of us could crank out Myst classic inside a month on our desktop. ...
I do not say that we are all TALENTED enough to "write a bestseller". Only that we have the EQUIPMENT to write a best-seller.
One of these things is not like the other,
One of these things just isn't the same....
I gather that I'm amongst a real nine-to-fiver crowd, here. The assumption must be that I've never touched a computer in my life, or something. Well, folks, I'm telling you what *I* know about.
And they're telling you that know, you don't. Despite all your prattling on about graphics and 3d and such, you missed the point.
Go ahead, make your game. Then when it sucks, you'll understand what everybody is talking about. The graphics ain't what makes the game. The sound ain't what makes the game. The story, the scenery, the cohesion, the plot.. these make the game. Myst was good because it was one of the first of its type and because it had a decent story attached to it that was actually interesting and tied all the bits together.
Like somebody above said, just because you have OpenOffice doesn't mean you can write a bestseller.
Can someone out there please give a clear and succinct explanation to this whole encryption scheme?
Sure. The gist of it is that you put your video file on a web server. Then you put what is basically an INI file on a webserver as well. People download the INI (renamed to an NSC extension), their media player fires up, reads the INI, finds the location of the media file, and starts downloading and playing it.
But then anybody could load and parse that INI and get your media file. So they obfuscated the INI file by changing the important bits of it to be what looks like nonsense.
This obfuscation works by shifting all the text into it's hexadecimal equivalent, performing some fairly minor math to shift those numbers into some other numbers, and then spitting out the hex as text. Couple other bits are added on to the beginning though... it uses a couple of different encoding types, and a length field to tell you how much data there is, but that's the gist of it.
It's not actually "encryption" because there's no actual key used. It's about as much encryption as ROT13 is, it's just a little more complicated than that.
Giving up one proprietary format for another is stupid - the end of this will be lots of licences bought in Adobe Acrobat software, with little or no effect for open source.
d ex_reference.html
Just because PDF can be read by virtually everyone, it is not an "open" file format. In fact, PDF is "protected" by several patents and some options are a well-kept secret of Adobe.
While you are correct that Adobe controls the PDF spec and it is not open in that sense, it is free as in beer, and anybody can use/implement the specification without Adobe's permission. They give their explicit permission to do so in the PDF references: http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/pdf/in
As for some options being "well-kept secrets", please clarify what you're talking about, as the PDF spec is offical, given out by Adobe themselves, and pretty damned comprehensive.
The OpenOffice format is definitely open source, so I assume you were not referring to it in any way.
You can't have it both ways - does a set of data get removed when all user-defined meta-data gets removed or not?
You never specified "user-defined" metadata before now. You just said metadata. The answer to this question is "no", but that's not the same question you asked in the first place.
Figure out WTF you're talking about, please.
What then is delete?
Removing the blob of data and all references to it.
How does a user distinguish between "remove an association from the blob of data" vs "remove this blob of data altogether". Should the blob automatically delete when you remove all metadata around it?
Yes, removing all references to the blob auto deletes the blob. Much like removing all references to a file (inode) on a unix system deletes the file.
If so, would you really want data vanishing just because you removed a keyword?
What about all the other metadata associated with a file? Creation date? Last modified time? Last accessed time? Filetype? Not all metadata is "keywords".
There's enough automatically gathered metadata to ensure that accidentally deleting blobs of data isn't going to be particularly easy to do.
What does partial backup look like on a system?
The blobs of data and the metadata associated to those blobs. But backups would more likely be along the lines of time based, where all the data changed since the last backup was backed up. Much like you'd back up a database system now.
How can you have a combination of partial backups and know you have a whole?
How can you know that with existing backup systems? There's not a lot of fundamental differences here.
I can do that with a set of five directories. Let's say you tag a set of files with "project fred". But one small file, that you almost never care about, gets tagged with "project ferd". What good is the ol' Fred backup now?
Let's say you have a set of files in a directory structure. But one file you almost never use gets moved, accidentally, elsewhere. Then you backup the directory structure. What good is the backup now?
Some problems (user error) cannot be fixed.
At some core level these blobs of data that users place on a system need ONE meaningful location where they always "are". You need someplace where the file will always be, no matter what other associations you remove. You need somewhere you know it will be to assure yourself EVERYTHING you care about is backed up or moved between systems.
Like I said, there's going to be other metadata than user entered metadata. Hell, at the very least the data chunks would be enumerated in some fashion, providing a static reference to them.
But some things simply never take off because in practice they are not practical, and the filesystem as a full-fledged database with no default structure is one of those things.
Again, where are you getting "no default structure" from? Of course there's a default structure. It's just not hierarchical in nature. Hierarchy is built onto the default structure anyway (location of the file on disk), so building a database on top of that same default structure is not particularly difficult. Integrating this sort of thing into the OS is the harder part.
It's most distinguishing feature was a built in shopping cart that docked into a receptacle in the rear.
Yeah, that is a *very* good idea. I would pay damned good money for a shopping cart with a well made set of rollers and collapsible legs that I could easily get into my trunk.
I live in an apartment, and taking groceries up the elevator and down some long halls is rather inconvienent. If I could take a cart into the store, shop, toss the cart, still loaded, into the trunk, then drive home and roll the cart upstairs, it would be well worth whatever the cost of the cart would be, for me.
You'd be boiling the soup in the outer cans before you got enough power to the tags on the inner items to energize them.
:)
Heh. I don't know if you can stack cans to form a good enough cage to block the extremely small amounts of power that would need to be received by the RFID tag to fire off a burst.
But it would probably be fun trying.
Never had that problem. Generally the only people I see using those are single people, usually with baskets.
Now, I don't shop at Wal-Mart, at all, for anything, period. I simply will not support such an abhorrent company.
But, when I was in a Wal-Mart recently with somebody else, I saw that their self-checkout stations were a bit different than any I'd seen elsewhere, as they actually had conveyor belts and such on them. So you may be correct as far as Wal-Mart self-checkout lanes go.
Gee, some supermarkets only changed a few years ago: until then the girls at the cash registers had to memorize product codes for over 600 products.
While I am aware that barcodes have been implemented in my lifetime, I've never seen any grocery store in the United States not using them. Not one. I don't doubt they exist, but even when I was a very little kid, barcodes were used at the supermarkets. Every mom and pop store has a barcode scanner. They may only have the one, and it may be handheld, but they have it.
Walk into Best Buy/COSTCO/Fry's with a blocker, and... ... get stopped on the way out the door by the guard there who wants to see your receipt and compare it to the thousands in merchandise that you're holding?
I mean, I dunno about the eating habits of Americans, but where I'm from we also buy fruit and vege's at the supermarket. How do they RFID those?
For prepackaged items, they stick an RFID sticker on the thing. For bag your own type of things, they have a few options:
-Weighing stations in the produce section that will spit out a tag for your items using printable conductive ink to make an RFID sticker, or
-Same thing with a barcode which you scan instead (I've seen these in some places, they're very nice), or
-A station at the checkout much like the self-checkouts are now, where you simply weigh each type of item in turn and select it on the touchscreen.
Use your imagination, and think of it as a station where your cart is scanned instead of a "walking through the door" type of scan. Because stores ain't going to be putting all their faith in any automated checkout system, and the door scanner idea, while nice, is just not going to happen.
Really all check out lines will be eliminated. Just walk out the store and you get charged. Shoplift prevention and checkout killed with 1 stone--brilliant.
Too many fundamental problems with it. RFID can be easily defeated by simply wrapping the product in tinfoil or some other conductive material.
No, what will happen will be the checkout lane gets a scanning device, much like the scanners that prevent shoplifting now using those magnetic sticky tabs. The scanner will let you roll an entire cart into it and it will scan it, taking a short time to do so (not on an as you roll through basis). After it's done, you will pay for your cart of stuff with a credit card or what have you, then the gate opens and you roll right on through the scanner.
Much more likely, IMO.
and soon the checkout line lies fallow along with the "self checkout" lines which I seldom see operating nowadays.
:)
Great, more room for me. As somebody who uses the self-checkout all the time, I love it. No more waiting behind some mom trying to buy two shopping carts full of goods while controlling 3 kids.
In reality, the checkout monkey will have to dig through all your crap to verify that the RFID worked, and...
No doubt, until they get it working well, much like the self-checkout lines do now. Haven't used them in a while? Might be worth trying again.
The reasoning I heard was that while incredibly cheap, RFID tags are alot more expensive then simply printing a bar-code on a box that you are already printing.
Yes. For the moment, you're right.
Of course, the concept of printing an RFID circuit using conductive ink is not really a new one either.
It's technology depreciation, man. New tech is expensive. Older tech isn't.
With RFID, there is the possibly of doing entire cart checkouts. Roll the cart into the scanning area, it gets all the RFID info, gives a total and you pay for your items. No need to remove everything from the cart.
Of course, this means that you likely want to bag the items as you shop instead of afterwards.
If you had suggested banning cars and substituing electric trolley cars, then I could see your argument, but horses are not a feasible option, and electric trolley cars are.
And where do you get the electricity to run all these trolley cars? Unless you've got some magical source of clean power, you're just blowing smoke. Literally, you're blowing smoke from coal power plants into the atmosphere. Oh, you do know that most of the country's power places are run on coal, don't you?
This doesn't even consider the energy involved in taking a medium sized city and reworking it to be entirely trolley-car (or other electric transportation) based. Or the energy needed to replace all those coal plants with something not spewing pollutants into the air...
A conversion to an economy with a minimal impact on CO2 would not be easy, but it actually would be feasible
At a rough guesstimate, I figure it would take somewhere between 75 to 100 years to complete, with everybody working on it full time. That's to eliminate fossil fuels and coal and such entirely.
And the Mojave desert, e.g., has enough potential solar power for most of the country, and North Dakota has enough potential wind power. (And yes, there are feasible ways to store it....
Unfortunately, there's no feasible ways to transport it. Power lines don't run across the country. It doesn't work that way. Maximum distance you can transmit electricity efficently is only in the few hundreds of miles, and that's not as the bird flies but as the length of the wire from end to end. Do you want everybody to move out west or something?
All that said, it would be a challenge. But don't claim that it's impossible...that just shows you have blinders on. Were I inclined, I could point to a lot of problems with the scenario I suggest. This doen't mean it's impossible, it means it's difficult.
I agree, but I think you haven't actually sat down and worked out exactly how difficult you're talking about here. I mean, you're suggesting that we completely rebuild something like 65% of the country, roughly.
In defense of recycling, it can save companies a good bit of money if done properly, which at least makes some people happy.
In one case (that being aluminum), you're correct. It's a hell of a lot cheaper to recycle aluminum than it is to mine the stuff out of bauxite and such.
In every other case, however, you're wrong. It doesn't save money, at best it's a break even proposition. More to the point, recycling is usually much, much less energy efficent than creating new products, and it usually is more harmful to the environment than creating the new product would be in the first place, when you consider the whole system.
Nature has a great recycling system already in place. It works, it's energy efficent, it's as environmentall friendly as you can get. Yeah, okay, it takes a few hundred thousand years for some items, but for the most part, it's probably the better way to go. It's called simply throwing the trash away and letting the bacteria have at it. Okay, so there's a bit more complications than that, but land fills aren't that hard to make, and quite frankly there is no shortage of land to fill anyway.
Recycling is a near total failure. It's not worth it on most any level. The levels where it is worth it, well, like you said, companies can save money that way. So they will. The problem is an economic one and like most economic problems, it tends to sort itself out.
Sometimes I get the sense from the Slashdot crowd that something isn't worth doing because perfection is impossible, perfect security being a prime example. I would like to ask, does that mean we quit using security measures? Do the people that say that leave their cars, homes and possessions unlocked? It would seem that is the logical conclusion of such an argument.
No, the real logical conclusion is that you should evaluate security as you would evaluate anything else: cost vs. benefit.
Is it worth it to lock your car? Sure. The cost of locking it is so near zero that any security benefits it provides are well worth it.
But a lot of computer security measures really only serve to make it harder for people to do things the right way and don't add any real security for those who want to bypass it. Take DRM as a prime example. The current DRM schemes used by Apple and Microsoft make it difficult for people to load their purchased music onto their own purchased music playing devices, but do nothing as far as keeping the music off the file sharing networks. The costs are higher than the benefits.
Asus A8N. 8 SATA drive connections + 4 IDE's = 12 drives possible, without any additional cards (and it has 4 or 5 PCI slots, IIRC). And both of the two sets of 4 SATA connectors can do hardware RAID.
:D
It's getting more than a little ridiculous in terms of the number of drives the things can support these days. The freakin' thing came with a card slot panel to fit on the back of the case, which takes two SATA connectors and a power connector. The idea being that you can attach internal SATA drives to the system without opening the case, presumably for transferring stuff on the go.
I think the game companies would be better served in writing their games such that the gameplay doesn't require a lot of repetative (and thus easily scripted) actions in order to advance in the game, instead of trying to "fine" their own customers.
The problem with a lot of MMORPGs is that a significant amount of time is spent gathering gold/experience/points in order to level up or otherwise build up your character to higher levels. While this does serve to keep the player playing for a long time (and thus to keep that subscription money rolling in), it's basically just gruntwork. Inventing something new may be difficult, but in the long run it might make for a better gaming experience all around.
#1, no selling of characters or items.
The only way to accomplish this is to:
-Not allow any trading of items between characters
-Not allow characters to drop items or pick up items dropped by other characters
-Not allow characters to sell items to shops and have those items then be buyable by other characters...
Essentially, if there's any way for me to take, say, a Sword of Justice, and have us perform some sequence of events that causes you to have the Sword of Justice and me not to have it, then I can sell the thing to you.
Whole organizations sprung up around trading of virtual items when that wasn't originally part of the game. As long as I can give something to you, then we can work out payment and other stuff like that offline.
As for selling of characters, there is NO way to prevent this, as I can simply sell you my account name and password and such.
Rule #2 should be anyone who uses a bot would be fined a large sum of money, something like $1000.
Good luck collecting that. Private entities cannot "fine" people and expect it to be enforced on anything other than a voluntary basis.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4136108.stm
:P
"Podcast" is now in the Oxford English Dictionary. So there you go, it's now offically a word.
Well I don't know about "millions of people," though I suspect you can't find a single podcast with a million subscribers...
...but by that definition slashdot itself used to have a podcast with its "Geeks in Space" radio show that was distributed as an MP3 (not a stream) and was episodic, etc. etc. etc.: every quality you gave to define "podcast" except for the RSS stream. So I don't think those are defining qualities of a podcast
...podcast is just an audio file obtained by a link from an RSS stream. It isn't just a rebranding of an old term but it certainly isn't a revolutionary thing.
Probably not, no, but there's easily more than a couple million who do listen to podcasts in general.
I disagree. Geeks in Space (which I did listen to once or twice) was basically a podcast before it became known as such or commonplace enough to define standards for it. They were ahead of their time, in some respects.
A bunch of things had to come together for the notion to become popular and widespread though. Portable MP3 players had to get big thus causing people to want new content. Easy to create standards like XML had to be made so that other standards, like RSS, could be written using them. And so on..
The fact that people are actually listening to these podcasts and that it's large and widespread is what is the revolutionary thing. The tech involved is, indeed, nothing special.