I know several people that never did *anything* online until Halo1 came around. Suddenly there was another wave of noobs a la aol that discovered email, chat, websurfing, and 'networking' of all sorts. People that had never heard of 'ethernet' were suddenly asking me questions about hubs, switches, throughput, latency, isdn, dsl....all because they wanted to play H1 online.
H1 happened to arrive at the right place, at the right time. Subsequently there has been a boom in the use of various communications technologies including cell phones, text messaging, and online game play. Not all caused by H players, but the users are sourced from the same audience.
I admit the first 'video game' I ever played was Pong. Halo's adversarial and cooperative modes are much improved over that early experience.;-)
Then perhaps you will be able to see past the end of your nose.
Think having a bunch of illiterate hoodlums running around doesn't have a negative impact on a childless member of society? Think some more, you might eventually get the correct answer.
Altruism is not required. For entirely selfish reasons I want good schools, attentive responsible parents, and my tax dollars well spent rather than wasted.
I was once handed a contract with a particularly abusive set of IP stipulations. Basically I swapped out all the references to employee and employer so that it said I would own the IP of all inventions of the company whether or not they were invented while I was at work, etc. and handed it back. He didn't flinch. He just looked at me sort of funny and took out the whole paragraph.
Ended up not working for that company, but that was because I'd gotten a better offer elsewhere.
There already several "virtual worlds" that exist, and have existed for decades, that have not been taxed and will not be taxed in the future.
Number One(and most obvious): The Game of Monopoly. It too has a purely virtual currency, people have made millions playing it, yet there is so far, and there will always be, ZERO taxation.
Number Two: Any casino. You convert your money to chips, play with chips, make millions, lose millions, and don't generate a cent in tax liability until you convert back to "real" money.
There's also plenty of argument about whether or not "real" paper money is actually money, but that is another arg...
As far as 'national' utilities go, we do have unwarranted subsidies of all sorts. If you want to get serious, most, yes MOST of the federal budget is spent on subsidies that quite frankly should not exist, but! and a very big BUT it is here in Texas, the power situation is apparently quite a bit different from that in the rest of the nation.
You don't have to hook up to the power utility at all. Nor does your neighbor, or other neighbor, or whole block....
Eventually you will form a co-op or your own small power generating business, or someone else will. It's the way things work.
If you don't want them, you don't have to have them. You also don't have to ask the government for permission to not use power from any particular provider, at least not here in USA/Texas.
Some time ago while doing some research into 'massively parallel' applications for a bio-research company I wrote an auto scaling hack on top of the Pov Ray PVM port. It worked fairly well at monitoring cpu loads across a network, dicing up the scenes to be rendered and shipping off chunks of work to various CPUs as they were available.
Overall the research project covered scaling from the CPU/core through cache to DRAM to disk to network even up to the point of when you'd have to actually scale the dispatcher in order to keep all of the processors busy. It was interesting stuff and produced some nice graphs of performance curves clearly indicating what was the bottleneck for each type of computing problem that we evaluated.
That's what's happening. Used to be 100KB was massive. Gates once said that 640KB was enough solid state memory and that the rest would be stored on disks. Later came 1.4MB floppies, 5MB hard drives, then 80MB, 120MB, not so long ago 500MB, and today >500GB. Magnetic drives will continue to carry the major, giga- and tera-byte data stores of the world, especially when low power consumption, ruggedness, and speed are not required. While solid state memory continues to move in from the small and fast(and expensive) to the ever larger and less costly.
An unusual example of this is my Nokia 770 which uses the removable flash card for virtual memory paging space. That is an application that would have been rejected out of hand as a possible use of solid state memory just a year or two ago. Today it works just fine and gives a nice performance and flexibility boost to a machine with limited(64MB) RAM space.
It has long been argued that as soon as the federal gov started enacting taxes against individuals, that the freedoms we had began to erode.
Today, people often speak of 'private property'. Try this: don't pay your local school district taxes. You will quickly find out that who or what owns what.
Even more recent, the 'eminent domain' fiasco has further reduced our freedoms.
That's the way they used to do it. Rather than lay there endlessly consuming costly resources for no good reason, just die. Everyone has to eventually, might as well leave something positive behind rather than be a net loss for the world.
From the classical definition: does the Earth look like a wandering light in the sky? No, so the Earth is not a planet. Neither is Neptune. What they are are spherical objects orbiting the center of mass of local solar system, as well as the center of the galaxy, and the center of mass of the Local Group, etc. Call them "spherobs" or somesuch if you *must* have a simple word.
That's it! From another classical source: "Earth is a class M spherob".
A smoothly scalable power supply. THAT would certainly boost the overall efficiency of your house. When the old lady spins up her blower, the control circuits sense the load and start up additional gens until the load is matched. When she shuts down, so do the extra gens. Same for the TV, microwave, etc. No waste running, even idling, unneeded gens and dumping power!
Combustion is NOT required. It is still a heat engine.
You simply have not considered the rest of the cycle.
The falling water does work. In order to do work, the water has to be lifted, that is, work must be done. The work is done by the gases in atmosphere. The heat comes from the sun. Gases in the atmosphere absorb the heat and expand(do work).
How much solar energy is required to lift X Kg of water Y meters when the starting and ending temps are both between 273 and 373 K? A lot more than is delivered at the water turbine for each Kg that passes through! It is a *very* inefficient process for converting solar heat into electricity.
A book in the dark is not in "human usable format" either. I have to use a machine called an "electric light" in order to be able to read a book at night.
In addition, while I am reading the book, an image, a real, observable, recordable copy is formed on the retina of my eye. Is that a legal copy, or since it is mirrored, a derived work? Can I legally photograph the inside of my eye while reading a book or watching a DVD?
Personally, I have to use another somewhat more sophisticated(than electric light) device in order to read books and watch DVDs whether I am in a well lit environment or not. The device is a primitive optical processor commonly known as "glasses".
Believe it or not, CDs and DVDs can be "read" using the same basic mechanisms. You can shine a light on the disk, observe the arrangement of the bits with a microscope and "decode" it yourself. No CD or DVD "player" is required. All that is required are the instruments I mentioned and some determination, but hey, it took some determination to learn to read conventional media as well...
My 1G SanDisk Cruzer has been dropped in the alley and driven over by cars and whatever repeatedly. While it doesn't look very good anymore with nicks, scrapes, and tire marks all over, it is intact and works just fine.
Running joke on anti-gunners who say/think that they have no deterrent effect on criminals...
If they really think that MY guns don't have a deterrent effect that also covers their house, tell them to do this: place a sign in your front yard that says "This is a gun free home".
Slashdot Mirror
I know several people that never did *anything* online until Halo1 came around. Suddenly there was another wave of noobs a la aol that discovered email, chat, websurfing, and 'networking' of all sorts. People that had never heard of 'ethernet' were suddenly asking me questions about hubs, switches, throughput, latency, isdn, dsl....all because they wanted to play H1 online.
;-)
H1 happened to arrive at the right place, at the right time. Subsequently there has been a boom in the use of various communications technologies including cell phones, text messaging, and online game play. Not all caused by H players, but the users are sourced from the same audience.
I admit the first 'video game' I ever played was Pong. Halo's adversarial and cooperative modes are much improved over that early experience.
I don't think that it is all that important since no one has even made an offer!
Used to be @aol.com was the noob .sig.
And say thank you.
You never know, you just might find a new job!
Then perhaps you will be able to see past the end of your nose.
Think having a bunch of illiterate hoodlums running around doesn't have a negative impact on a childless member of society? Think some more, you might eventually get the correct answer.
Altruism is not required. For entirely selfish reasons I want good schools, attentive responsible parents, and my tax dollars well spent rather than wasted.
Straight from the horse's mouth:
>> I have no idea what goes on in high schools today.
You should be ashamed.
Big headline:
CA Solar Use Falling Because of Economics
The statement is false.
Solar use is NOT falling in California, only the rate of rebate applications is.
I was once handed a contract with a particularly abusive set of IP stipulations. Basically I swapped out all the references to employee and employer so that it said I would own the IP of all inventions of the company whether or not they were invented while I was at work, etc. and handed it back. He didn't flinch. He just looked at me sort of funny and took out the whole paragraph.
Ended up not working for that company, but that was because I'd gotten a better offer elsewhere.
There already several "virtual worlds" that exist, and have existed for decades, that have not been taxed and will not be taxed in the future.
Number One(and most obvious): The Game of Monopoly. It too has a purely virtual currency, people have made millions playing it, yet there is so far, and there will always be, ZERO taxation.
Number Two: Any casino. You convert your money to chips, play with chips, make millions, lose millions, and don't generate a cent in tax liability until you convert back to "real" money.
There's also plenty of argument about whether or not "real" paper money is actually money, but that is another arg...
He has come up with a workable idea. There have been engineering studies done. It is possible. You have proposed a cost.
How about flipping it over?
You propose a solution "down here" and we'll consider the cost.
Until then, all you are doing with "solutions down here" is handwaving.
As far as 'national' utilities go, we do have unwarranted subsidies of all sorts. If you want to get serious, most, yes MOST of the federal budget is spent on subsidies that quite frankly should not exist, but! and a very big BUT it is here in Texas, the power situation is apparently quite a bit different from that in the rest of the nation.
You don't have to hook up to the power utility at all.
Nor does your neighbor, or other neighbor, or whole block....
Eventually you will form a co-op or your own small power generating business, or someone else will. It's the way things work.
If you don't want them, you don't have to have them. You also don't have to ask the government for permission to not use power from any particular provider, at least not here in USA/Texas.
Some time ago while doing some research into 'massively parallel' applications for a bio-research company I wrote an auto scaling hack on top of the Pov Ray PVM port. It worked fairly well at monitoring cpu loads across a network, dicing up the scenes to be rendered and shipping off chunks of work to various CPUs as they were available.
Overall the research project covered scaling from the CPU/core through cache to DRAM to disk to network even up to the point of when you'd have to actually scale the dispatcher in order to keep all of the processors busy. It was interesting stuff and produced some nice graphs of performance curves clearly indicating what was the bottleneck for each type of computing problem that we evaluated.
Damn it was nice working for that company.
That's what's happening. Used to be 100KB was massive. Gates once said that 640KB was enough solid state memory and that the rest would be stored on disks. Later came 1.4MB floppies, 5MB hard drives, then 80MB, 120MB, not so long ago 500MB, and today >500GB. Magnetic drives will continue to carry the major, giga- and tera-byte data stores of the world, especially when low power consumption, ruggedness, and speed are not required. While solid state memory continues to move in from the small and fast(and expensive) to the ever larger and less costly.
An unusual example of this is my Nokia 770 which uses the removable flash card for virtual memory paging space. That is an application that would have been rejected out of hand as a possible use of solid state memory just a year or two ago. Today it works just fine and gives a nice performance and flexibility boost to a machine with limited(64MB) RAM space.
It has long been argued that as soon as the federal gov started enacting taxes against individuals, that the freedoms we had began to erode.
Today, people often speak of 'private property'. Try this: don't pay your local school district taxes. You will quickly find out that who or what owns what.
Even more recent, the 'eminent domain' fiasco has further reduced our freedoms.
Here I thought I was old, trying to teach the young.
All 4 of my GPs were lucky I guess. They all lived healthy until their late 80s then got sick and died in less than a week, or just died overnight.
Have a little dignity.
That's the way they used to do it. Rather than lay there endlessly consuming costly resources for no good reason, just die. Everyone has to eventually, might as well leave something positive behind rather than be a net loss for the world.
From the classical definition: does the Earth look like a wandering light in the sky? No, so the Earth is not a planet. Neither is Neptune. What they are are spherical objects orbiting the center of mass of local solar system, as well as the center of the galaxy, and the center of mass of the Local Group, etc. Call them "spherobs" or somesuch if you *must* have a simple word.
That's it! From another classical source: "Earth is a class M spherob".
That's the recipe!
A smoothly scalable power supply. THAT would certainly boost the overall efficiency of your house. When the old lady spins up her blower, the control circuits sense the load and start up additional gens until the load is matched. When she shuts down, so do the extra gens. Same for the TV, microwave, etc. No waste running, even idling, unneeded gens and dumping power!
Combustion is NOT required. It is still a heat engine.
You simply have not considered the rest of the cycle.
The falling water does work. In order to do work, the water has to be lifted, that is, work must be done. The work is done by the gases in atmosphere. The heat comes from the sun. Gases in the atmosphere absorb the heat and expand(do work).
How much solar energy is required to lift X Kg of water Y meters when the starting and ending temps are both between 273 and 373 K? A lot more than is delivered at the water turbine for each Kg that passes through! It is a *very* inefficient process for converting solar heat into electricity.
It is not really all that much of a stretch...
A book in the dark is not in "human usable format" either. I have to use a machine called an "electric light" in order to be able to read a book at night.
In addition, while I am reading the book, an image, a real, observable, recordable copy is formed on the retina of my eye. Is that a legal copy, or since it is mirrored, a derived work? Can I legally photograph the inside of my eye while reading a book or watching a DVD?
Personally, I have to use another somewhat more sophisticated(than electric light) device in order to read books and watch DVDs whether I am in a well lit environment or not. The device is a primitive optical processor commonly known as "glasses".
Believe it or not, CDs and DVDs can be "read" using the same basic mechanisms. You can shine a light on the disk, observe the arrangement of the bits with a microscope and "decode" it yourself. No CD or DVD "player" is required. All that is required are the instruments I mentioned and some determination, but hey, it took some determination to learn to read conventional media as well...
My 1G SanDisk Cruzer has been dropped in the alley and driven over by cars and whatever repeatedly. While it doesn't look very good anymore with nicks, scrapes, and tire marks all over, it is intact and works just fine.
Running joke on anti-gunners who say/think that they have no deterrent effect on criminals...
;-)
If they really think that MY guns don't have a deterrent effect that also covers their house, tell them to do this: place a sign in your front yard that says "This is a gun free home".
Watch what happens.
That's right. We didn't. They did, and it stuck.
America got its name out of ignorance. Look it up.
Seems appropriate today.
I suggest that they name the bridge
"Jefu, the bridge to knowledge from those without"
Sounds nice to me.