Google Fiber can only offer their services in places where the local government has not awarded monopoly rights to a single ISP. Probably they'd get sued by Comcast if they tried to offer Google Fiber. What needs to be done is to make these kinds of monopolies illegal. Laws that fix this are not easy to get right though.
The fact that you have to choose between Comcast and dialup (because officially you have a choice) is contraproductive to free market economy. It is wrong. If you fixed that Netfix would be able to tell their customers "on so and so date we will stop paying the bribery Comcast demands and the Netflix service to Comcast customers will be once again fucked up by Comcast." Fix the monopoly and Comcast will either die or correct their business practices.
The forced FBI warnings and other crap like it are meant to get people to just torrent the disks. Face it, the one organization that really pushes them is the one that would loose it's meaning if nobody pirated. And the media companies that created this treacherous beast fall for it hook, line and sinker. Despite the fact that the real goals of this organization are directly in conflict with their own goals.
Each time an App wanted to update in the last 6 months, it was to increase its access to areas of my Samsung phone that I thought were completely un-necessary for it to work properly.
That's because apps that don't need new permissions don't need to ask. They can just update.
Makes you wonder who in the Google Store is rubber stamping the ok on such Apps!
Nobody. This isn't the walled garden from Apple. No rubber stamps needed. I am sure that Google has a way to pull apps that give serious privacy complaints but nobody checks them before they get to the Play Store.
When will privacy groups wake up and start lawsuits against App makers and/or Google?
What Google does is probably perfectly legal. There are even quite good reasons to let the app makers choose the permissions and the users just choose the apps. I do not think those reasons are strong enough to let it be this way. A couple of months ago I installed a free to play game. I did a micropayment investment in it because I feel they made a cool game. Now they changed the game to need location permissions. The game is not going to get that, no way. So now I can't update the game anymore (at least not until I Cyanogen my phone). Last time I checked it still ran fine without updating, but how long is that going to last?
Swype needing location permissions would be a reason not to install it. It doesn't need location in order to function as a keyboard. If I wanted Swype and were able to deny it the location I would do just that. The limited options means the app would not get installed, even if and when the makers have no malicious intent. I can not determine that intent. I can determine what rights it asks and what rights it minimally needs.
Yes, any other comment has the same effect. However there are many/.ers and there is such a thing as writers block. Once I decide I must post while having no content ready I can't think of content. Usually I post once I have something to say. And half of the time I decide to delete it instead of post it, but that's a different beast.
Different statistics are important for different people. Imagine a couple. Both of them work. One drives a Tesla to work and has 60% capacity left at the end of the day. The other works closer to their home so the i3 is sufficient for daily use. When they go on a holiday they can take the Tesla. There are superchargers across the country so they can actually get there with the Tesla versus the i3. However, they saved a lot of money on initial investment versus if they bought 2 Tesla's.
Or imagine someone who uses the i3 for their daily use while renting a car for their occasional needs.
Both cars have their places. They are about as similar as a phone and a laptop.
That is not 2 cylinders. That is 2 stroke. Quite a different beast. One of the reasons for the pollution is that 2 stroke engines need lubricant in their fuel. Lubricant doesn't burn properly so it exits the engine as soot. Soot is a terrible fine particulate pollution. Another is that they are less fuel efficient.
I am an avid biker and although I cant counter your points completely I must argue against them.
You can't carry as much luggage
Velobobiles have a surprising amount of cargo space. That is only the Orca, as it seems to have about the most of the production models I know but Quest has sufficient for my daily needs. If I need more I borrow a car (I would rent if borrowing wasn't possible).
rain and other inclement situations suck a lot more
While still true, I have a hood on my bike. This keeps rain out and makes the bike a bit more aerodynamic. Cold isn't a problem, as cycling produces a lot of heat. One guy bikes the year round in Canada and even -14C(6.8F) doesn't need much extra isolation. I'd link to his blogspot but I don't know how Blogspot handles sudden heavy traffic. I wouldn't want to bankrupt the guy.
and it can be slightly more scary to ride one on the highway than the scion
That depends strongly on country. Here in the Netherlands most 80 km/h (50 mph) roads have separate bike paths and the car drivers expect bicyclists. It is a typical bootstrapping issue: There isn't much use for bike paths if nobody rides bikes once they can legally drive a car. Most people don't ride bikes once they can legally drive a car if there is no infrastructure for it. In the Netherlands biking has been default since horses stopped being common. When the cars became common they already needed to share the road with hundreds of thousands of bikes. When there became too many cars to be safe the bikes got their own paths. Currently intercity fast bike "highways" are under heavy construction across the country.
but bikes have a much better MPG*
And eating much food is a unhealthy hobby if you don't sport much. I like eating, the biking keeps my weight within sane limits.
significantly lower sticker price
Not as much if you lower the other disadvantages. My bike cost me E8500 ($12000) in total (quest + some upgrades like better suspension, hood and turn signals). There are bikes in the E10K-15K range.
range
I have tried to bike 100 km(62 miles) daily as my commute. I am currently trying to get a place closer to my work as it is just to far. I need 3 hours a day just to get to my work and back and that takes too long.
when I was riding a LOT, was that I wasn't really saving any money because my calories cost way more than a gallon of gas, and my intake went up significantly.
While true there are a few points I'd like to make on that. 1. It levels after a while. In the beginning you eat for fuel + to build muscle. After two years or so the building muscle part is mostly over. 2. Many people like to eat too much. It is difficult for many to eat as little as needed. 3.... 4. Profit!
According to some calculator I found I needed about 2000 Kcal as fuel to bike 100 km. (number depends on a lot) That is the same amount as my base calorie intake. However, most of that doesn't need to be in the form of expensive meat (or meat replacement) or even vegetables. It needs to supply calories, not protein, vitamins or minerals. Potatoes or pasta is good enough. 2000 Calories is 4.1 large portions of French fries at Mc Donalds according to Nutritiondata.com. I can't find a price but that is only a couple of euro's here in the Netherlands. If you make the food yourself you save on that.
It would probably be more energy efficient to have a speaker and a computational model to make the sound a petrol car would make given the actions the driver takes. You could have the sound of a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine in your car. Or a jet engine. Or a steam engine. That would also allow the obnoxious sound to be loudest inside the car instead of damaging my ears while you drive past my bike. It would also allow you to turn it off when you have company in your car and you want to chat while driving.
Repair cost for VW at least varies great per country. Here in the Netherlands a VW Golf has one of the lowest maintenance costs. Many young kids buy a Golf and relatively many of them total it before the tires have worn. This makes the second hand spare parts quite affordable. 'Round here US cars are expensive to drive. They use far to much fuel (stuff is expensive here: E1.819 per liter (or $9.52/gallon) for simple 95 octane fuel) and the spare parts are expensive.
Polarized hull plating could be effective against anything with a charge, like electron beams, positron beams or black holes that are charged so they can be electrically accelerated (this is the realm of science fiction). However, cannonballs do not have charge. Lasers do not have charge. They ignore the hull polarization.
You can't moderate and post in the same discussion.
Once you post the moderation buttons are removed. If you moderate first and post later the moderation is removed. The mod point is NOT returned to your "supply".
Since the mod drop-down menu isn't magically immune to misclicks people make accidental mods. Some choose to fix it. Having said that, Noscript can prevent moderations from being applied until you click "moderate" on the bottom. Thus a misclick in the mod-drop down menu is easily corrected. However this also means one can forget to click the "moderate" button and thus do nothing.
I don't have the official reason and I am not the deity who decides them. I am just repeating what I remember someone saying the reason was. If this rule wasn't there a conflict of interest might arise. Discussions sometimes tend to get people angry. If the angry posters can moderate the problems are just to big.
Not quite: plasma windows exist. And any protection against lasers is going to be opaque or reflective at the laser frequency, or it isn't going to be very effective. If you want it to be effective against all frequencies of a Free Electron Laser you need it to be completely opaque or reflective, so you wouldn't be able to see out of it.
It can't be a Dyson sphere because it is not big enough to encompass a star. It could theoretically be an artificially made object of similar properties. However, that is IMHO less likely than an ancient brown dwarf or a rogue planet.
It may permeate us. We just don't know. If dark matter is really not interacting with anything except that it causes gravity, how would we know? The stuff could be spread out so much between the stars that it is at a not-measurable density. Normal matter tends to clump together due to gravity. What if dark matter doesn't do that? We just don't know.
Having said that: I don't like dark matter and dark energy either. I just don't have enough data to dispute it.
But seriously, we don't know. To give it a name we call the force "dark energy" but it isn't clear what does it. Just that it happens (with reasonable certainty). Maybe future research will indicate the research that proved the universe was expanding was just a statistical fluke. Maybe we will find some force hidden in the equations that drives it. Maybe we'll never find out. Stay tuned to know more!
We can make unsinkable objects. The problems with the Titanic were mostly because the designers were incapable of modeling the behavior correctly because they had no computers and human calculations powering a finite element method is expensive to say the least. It had been done for at least one project, the Afsluitdijk in the Netherlands, but against extreme cost. Nowadays we have computers that can model such a problem with an accuracy those designers could only dream of. Also, we learned that watertight bulkheads should end significantly above the water level, so that tipping doesn't get the tops below water level. Oops.
No they don't. The shielding on any fission reactor is so massive that a normal torpedo won't hurt it. A nuclear torpedo would, but in that case the area is screwed anyway.
Chances are that even a nuclear bomb isn't going to cause much extra fission in the reactor fuel. The neutron pulse from it travels at 14000 km/sec. That is way faster than the shockwave that damages the shielding. So the reactor shielding is still there to absorb much of the neutron pulse. If the neutrons from the bomb are not inducing much extra fission in the reactor fuel the radiation from that fuel isn't going to make a difference in that mess of radioactive isotopes that is caused in the water. Warning: "much extra fission" is relative to the frakkin' nuclear bomb that starts the whole mess.
That isn't to say its by definition a good idea to place a nuclear reactor on an oil rig-like structure. What we need is modeling of worst case scenarios. Model the flow patterns of the fuel broken up into little fragments without containment during both still weather and the largest storm ever seen times 2. What are the dosages in the few square km around the site? Maybe everything sinks to the bottom, where it's really harmless, oil floats, which makes it dangerous. The ocean floor is usually empty, so a couple of kg of uranium isn't going to do much. Does uranium dissolve in seawater? How much of the fission chain dissolves in seawater?
Waste heat is often a lot and usually needs to be moved away fast. If you let the heatflow of a car pass through these tiles you's need a lot more surface area to get sufficient heat out of the engine. If you try to cool a CPU through these things the CPU will overheat quite soon. These things have "Ultralow thermal conductivity" according to the article. That means they act as thermal insulators. Not what you want when using waste heat. This is useful for other places. 1. Places where you can replace insulation. A house has too low delta T, but I could imagine the inside of the burn chamber of a central heating installation. 2. Places where heat is generated for the specific purpose of powering these thermoelectric tiles. Then you have less losses from normal thermal conductivity.
Slashdot Mirror
Google Fiber can only offer their services in places where the local government has not awarded monopoly rights to a single ISP.
Probably they'd get sued by Comcast if they tried to offer Google Fiber.
What needs to be done is to make these kinds of monopolies illegal. Laws that fix this are not easy to get right though.
The fact that you have to choose between Comcast and dialup (because officially you have a choice) is contraproductive to free market economy. It is wrong.
If you fixed that Netfix would be able to tell their customers "on so and so date we will stop paying the bribery Comcast demands and the Netflix service to Comcast customers will be once again fucked up by Comcast."
Fix the monopoly and Comcast will either die or correct their business practices.
The forced FBI warnings and other crap like it are meant to get people to just torrent the disks.
Face it, the one organization that really pushes them is the one that would loose it's meaning if nobody pirated. And the media companies that created this treacherous beast fall for it hook, line and sinker. Despite the fact that the real goals of this organization are directly in conflict with their own goals.
Each time an App wanted to update in the last 6 months, it was to increase its access to areas of my Samsung phone that I thought were completely un-necessary for it to work properly.
That's because apps that don't need new permissions don't need to ask. They can just update.
Makes you wonder who in the Google Store is rubber stamping the ok on such Apps!
Nobody. This isn't the walled garden from Apple. No rubber stamps needed.
I am sure that Google has a way to pull apps that give serious privacy complaints but nobody checks them before they get to the Play Store.
When will privacy groups wake up and start lawsuits against App makers and/or Google?
What Google does is probably perfectly legal. There are even quite good reasons to let the app makers choose the permissions and the users just choose the apps.
I do not think those reasons are strong enough to let it be this way.
A couple of months ago I installed a free to play game. I did a micropayment investment in it because I feel they made a cool game. Now they changed the game to need location permissions. The game is not going to get that, no way. So now I can't update the game anymore (at least not until I Cyanogen my phone). Last time I checked it still ran fine without updating, but how long is that going to last?
Swype needing location permissions would be a reason not to install it. It doesn't need location in order to function as a keyboard. If I wanted Swype and were able to deny it the location I would do just that. The limited options means the app would not get installed, even if and when the makers have no malicious intent. I can not determine that intent. I can determine what rights it asks and what rights it minimally needs.
Yes, any other comment has the same effect. /.ers and there is such a thing as writers block. Once I decide I must post while having no content ready I can't think of content. Usually I post once I have something to say.
However there are many
And half of the time I decide to delete it instead of post it, but that's a different beast.
Different statistics are important for different people.
Imagine a couple. Both of them work. One drives a Tesla to work and has 60% capacity left at the end of the day. The other works closer to their home so the i3 is sufficient for daily use.
When they go on a holiday they can take the Tesla. There are superchargers across the country so they can actually get there with the Tesla versus the i3.
However, they saved a lot of money on initial investment versus if they bought 2 Tesla's.
Or imagine someone who uses the i3 for their daily use while renting a car for their occasional needs.
Both cars have their places. They are about as similar as a phone and a laptop.
That is not 2 cylinders. That is 2 stroke. Quite a different beast.
One of the reasons for the pollution is that 2 stroke engines need lubricant in their fuel. Lubricant doesn't burn properly so it exits the engine as soot. Soot is a terrible fine particulate pollution.
Another is that they are less fuel efficient.
I am an avid biker and although I cant counter your points completely I must argue against them.
You can't carry as much luggage
Velobobiles have a surprising amount of cargo space. That is only the Orca, as it seems to have about the most of the production models I know but Quest has sufficient for my daily needs. If I need more I borrow a car (I would rent if borrowing wasn't possible).
and you can't easily have a passenger,
2 person velomobile prototype is under development.
rain and other inclement situations suck a lot more
While still true, I have a hood on my bike. This keeps rain out and makes the bike a bit more aerodynamic.
Cold isn't a problem, as cycling produces a lot of heat. One guy bikes the year round in Canada and even -14C(6.8F) doesn't need much extra isolation. I'd link to his blogspot but I don't know how Blogspot handles sudden heavy traffic. I wouldn't want to bankrupt the guy.
and it can be slightly more scary to ride one on the highway than the scion
That depends strongly on country. Here in the Netherlands most 80 km/h (50 mph) roads have separate bike paths and the car drivers expect bicyclists.
It is a typical bootstrapping issue: There isn't much use for bike paths if nobody rides bikes once they can legally drive a car. Most people don't ride bikes once they can legally drive a car if there is no infrastructure for it.
In the Netherlands biking has been default since horses stopped being common. When the cars became common they already needed to share the road with hundreds of thousands of bikes. When there became too many cars to be safe the bikes got their own paths. Currently intercity fast bike "highways" are under heavy construction across the country.
but bikes have a much better MPG*
And eating much food is a unhealthy hobby if you don't sport much. I like eating, the biking keeps my weight within sane limits.
significantly lower sticker price
Not as much if you lower the other disadvantages. My bike cost me E8500 ($12000) in total (quest + some upgrades like better suspension, hood and turn signals).
There are bikes in the E10K-15K range.
range
I have tried to bike 100 km(62 miles) daily as my commute. I am currently trying to get a place closer to my work as it is just to far. I need 3 hours a day just to get to my work and back and that takes too long.
when I was riding a LOT, was that I wasn't really saving any money because my calories cost way more than a gallon of gas, and my intake went up significantly.
While true there are a few points I'd like to make on that. ...
1. It levels after a while. In the beginning you eat for fuel + to build muscle. After two years or so the building muscle part is mostly over.
2. Many people like to eat too much. It is difficult for many to eat as little as needed.
3.
4. Profit!
According to some calculator I found I needed about 2000 Kcal as fuel to bike 100 km. (number depends on a lot) That is the same amount as my base calorie intake.
However, most of that doesn't need to be in the form of expensive meat (or meat replacement) or even vegetables. It needs to supply calories, not protein, vitamins or minerals. Potatoes or pasta is good enough.
2000 Calories is 4.1 large portions of French fries at Mc Donalds according to Nutritiondata.com. I can't find a price but that is only a couple of euro's here in the Netherlands. If you make the food yourself you save on that.
It would probably be more energy efficient to have a speaker and a computational model to make the sound a petrol car would make given the actions the driver takes. You could have the sound of a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine in your car. Or a jet engine. Or a steam engine.
That would also allow the obnoxious sound to be loudest inside the car instead of damaging my ears while you drive past my bike.
It would also allow you to turn it off when you have company in your car and you want to chat while driving.
I am full metric. I use mm squared (damn /. not accepting either  or 2).
Well, how many electrons can you herd into a volume of a gallon?
Repair cost for VW at least varies great per country. Here in the Netherlands a VW Golf has one of the lowest maintenance costs. Many young kids buy a Golf and relatively many of them total it before the tires have worn. This makes the second hand spare parts quite affordable.
'Round here US cars are expensive to drive. They use far to much fuel (stuff is expensive here: E1.819 per liter (or $9.52/gallon) for simple 95 octane fuel) and the spare parts are expensive.
Polarized hull plating could be effective against anything with a charge, like electron beams, positron beams or black holes that are charged so they can be electrically accelerated (this is the realm of science fiction).
However, cannonballs do not have charge. Lasers do not have charge. They ignore the hull polarization.
Quoting from the moderation rules
You can't moderate and post in the same discussion.
Once you post the moderation buttons are removed.
If you moderate first and post later the moderation is removed. The mod point is NOT returned to your "supply".
Since the mod drop-down menu isn't magically immune to misclicks people make accidental mods. Some choose to fix it.
Having said that, Noscript can prevent moderations from being applied until you click "moderate" on the bottom. Thus a misclick in the mod-drop down menu is easily corrected. However this also means one can forget to click the "moderate" button and thus do nothing.
I don't have the official reason and I am not the deity who decides them. I am just repeating what I remember someone saying the reason was.
If this rule wasn't there a conflict of interest might arise. Discussions sometimes tend to get people angry. If the angry posters can moderate the problems are just to big.
Not quite: plasma windows exist.
And any protection against lasers is going to be opaque or reflective at the laser frequency, or it isn't going to be very effective.
If you want it to be effective against all frequencies of a Free Electron Laser you need it to be completely opaque or reflective, so you wouldn't be able to see out of it.
You might think differently once your ramscoop collides with it because you chose to try to ignore it.
It can't be a Dyson sphere because it is not big enough to encompass a star.
It could theoretically be an artificially made object of similar properties. However, that is IMHO less likely than an ancient brown dwarf or a rogue planet.
It may permeate us. We just don't know.
If dark matter is really not interacting with anything except that it causes gravity, how would we know? The stuff could be spread out so much between the stars that it is at a not-measurable density.
Normal matter tends to clump together due to gravity. What if dark matter doesn't do that? We just don't know.
Having said that: I don't like dark matter and dark energy either. I just don't have enough data to dispute it.
That's just because $deity wants it to be so.
But seriously, we don't know. To give it a name we call the force "dark energy" but it isn't clear what does it. Just that it happens (with reasonable certainty).
Maybe future research will indicate the research that proved the universe was expanding was just a statistical fluke. Maybe we will find some force hidden in the equations that drives it. Maybe we'll never find out.
Stay tuned to know more!
"What are you doing in my house at 1 in the morning?"
At least that's what he said when I asked him about it.
ARM doesn't make processors. They make processor designs. Their customers make processors.
With 2 tails, just to mess with the environmentalists.
We can make unsinkable objects. The problems with the Titanic were mostly because the designers were incapable of modeling the behavior correctly because they had no computers and human calculations powering a finite element method is expensive to say the least. It had been done for at least one project, the Afsluitdijk in the Netherlands, but against extreme cost.
Nowadays we have computers that can model such a problem with an accuracy those designers could only dream of.
Also, we learned that watertight bulkheads should end significantly above the water level, so that tipping doesn't get the tops below water level. Oops.
No they don't.
The shielding on any fission reactor is so massive that a normal torpedo won't hurt it. A nuclear torpedo would, but in that case the area is screwed anyway.
Chances are that even a nuclear bomb isn't going to cause much extra fission in the reactor fuel.
The neutron pulse from it travels at 14000 km/sec. That is way faster than the shockwave that damages the shielding. So the reactor shielding is still there to absorb much of the neutron pulse.
If the neutrons from the bomb are not inducing much extra fission in the reactor fuel the radiation from that fuel isn't going to make a difference in that mess of radioactive isotopes that is caused in the water.
Warning: "much extra fission" is relative to the frakkin' nuclear bomb that starts the whole mess.
That isn't to say its by definition a good idea to place a nuclear reactor on an oil rig-like structure.
What we need is modeling of worst case scenarios. Model the flow patterns of the fuel broken up into little fragments without containment during both still weather and the largest storm ever seen times 2. What are the dosages in the few square km around the site?
Maybe everything sinks to the bottom, where it's really harmless, oil floats, which makes it dangerous. The ocean floor is usually empty, so a couple of kg of uranium isn't going to do much.
Does uranium dissolve in seawater? How much of the fission chain dissolves in seawater?
Waste heat is often a lot and usually needs to be moved away fast.
If you let the heatflow of a car pass through these tiles you's need a lot more surface area to get sufficient heat out of the engine.
If you try to cool a CPU through these things the CPU will overheat quite soon.
These things have "Ultralow thermal conductivity" according to the article. That means they act as thermal insulators. Not what you want when using waste heat.
This is useful for other places.
1. Places where you can replace insulation. A house has too low delta T, but I could imagine the inside of the burn chamber of a central heating installation.
2. Places where heat is generated for the specific purpose of powering these thermoelectric tiles. Then you have less losses from normal thermal conductivity.