An easy explanation for developers "going rogue" is that the pay is so very very bad that the difference between unemployment and salary whilst you write the code is so small that it is not as hard a decision as in other lines of work.
I always giggle when some one asks me didn't I want to be a game developer at one point in time. My response is yes, but I like playing games, and having a home/family far more than working on/building games. I'd much rather do the routine db work that is the meat work of all business and get paid a steady decent amount. That let's me buy stuff like a home and games that I have lots and lots of free time to play. I work from 8-5 and rarely get called in after 5. If I want to spend the evening leveling in Disgaea, I can do that. I find that much more fun than working 12-16 hour days for weeks on end with no additional pay.
I tell folks that you've got to be a special sort of insane to be a game developer. I know my limits, and that I'm not wired that way. I'm wondering how many "game developers" were/are early/mid 20's males that have finally started to realize that making games isn't the same thing as playing games and have decided to personally sell out and make more money in a different setting.
PDF is a standard format that Adobe dominates with Acrobat. It's the favorite way for offices to send around read only documents that will have no chance of problems. Unless you send it to someone with Linux, in which case something funny can happen. Not so much in reading it, but if they do indeed want to make changes anyway. The SW for editing and managing PDF docs isn't so reliable on Linux, and not at all widely available. It's probably easy for IBM to fix that problem, because PDF availability for Linux isn't so bad, just needs some more "formalizing". Getting a brand name, but still open source, edition from IBM with support and training will help.
We do all our office crap in MS Office and then just print to PDF on those latitudes with standard acrobat installed. That basically freezes the document from everyone here editing it. If we want to make changes, we go back to the original MS Office doc. Why wouldn't the Linux solution be the same except for using open office instead of MS Office docs? I mean no one expects end users to edit PDFs. The best that they can do is fill out those PDF Forms, but they can't really change the form or anything. That's for the agency that made the form to do never an end user. I can't tell you how many PDF Forms that I've come across that you have to print out to fill out by hand and then either scan back into pdf or just mail in. It's an annoying step, but hey you can't get around it so you develop processes to deal with it.
You have to have nano tech or some other magic tech that makes general business machines useless. If the only real appliance that you need is a big black replicator box, then you'd have it and very little other crap. Now, it would be likely that IBM would make the big black box, but hey you can't win all the time.
Much like the terminator, Ma Bell's shattered pieces have slowly been coming back together for the past few decades. What's worse, she's a badder bitch now than she ever was before... Much like with any disease, as the host got weaker, the viruses took over, and prospered.
Wouldn't that make AT&T a zombie Queen or would zombie hydra be more it?
One day, both the developers quit at the same time due to the manager being the biggest unlikeable bastard that any of us had ever met. This left the "database" completely unmaintained.
The manager ended up contracting a Lotus Notes expert from IBM themselves to do some emergency bug fixing. The following Monday morning, the expert turned up at 9 AM sharp, in an equally sharp suit, and carrying a trademark Thinkpad.
He sat down at a computer, looked at the code, and cried with laughter for a good, solid ten minutes, then got up and left.
See a really good contractor would have found either or both of those developers and have them work for 10x of their normal price and just be the front man. Today it's even easier. Your contractor can say, I'll need today to gather notes and talk to people "so I can give our folks in India the specs" where the folks in India are instead your former now happily highly paid employees.
This is why the government is going to have to step into health care in some way. It's in the Health Insurance company's best interests to not insurance people that are high risk. In a free market, those people will end up being uninsured.
I hate government intervention in any market, but I don't see any way around it. You can walk to the store and work. You can't perform an appendectomy on yourself.
You've also forgotten that its conveniently illegal to even own entire classes of drugs without a doctor to sign off on it. So even if you looked up stuff about a certain drug and were willing to use it, you wouldn't be able to with out a doctor's sign off on it.
How soon will health insurance be like auto insurance where they want you to have a 25K min. liability insurance if you even own a car? I'm sure that's not in all our best interest, but you know the insurance folks got those numbers set as the min in most states. What choice did we have about it? Not, much you've gotta pay the insurance tax if you want to drive.
There are days that I wish the religious people would get sick and tired of the entire insurance industry using things like acts of God to stop paying you money when you need it. I really hate the phrase Act of God as it relates to the insurance industry. (If you want to be nit picky, everything is an act of god!) I don't believe god is that active, but heck, even on the days that I do, I don't think you should be able to use god/acts of god as an excuse or a get out of payment card. Hey any pre-existing conditions that I may have are acts of god.;) It's an act of god that I even pay insurance, yet its required to own a car and on the mortgage that I have, so I can't get out of it without being ultra rich. If I were ultra rich, I wouldn't need the damn insurance any ways.
Until they get a clue eBooks are dead in the water. (And I like mine, that should tell you something.)
I love the concept and really can't wait to get one myself. My problems is their wanting me to spend a $300-400 on a single purpose device that usually only reads their chosen format. Sure the display is great and the batteries last a long time, but I'd rather spend a few more for a laptop that can read and convert nearly any format that I happen to have. When I can spend $30-50 and get a brand new one and not a "used" or ebay one, then I'd reconsider picking one up. Until then, I'm sticking with reading on my PC.
Is that what it's about? Who came up with the lousy idea of mixing modern and ancient number systems?
Abbreviations. I hate roman numerals with a passion, but I can see why some would use them as and abbreviation for a prefix. Of course, you could always use, 1e3 instead of 1000 or 1e6 for 1000000. Why isn't that more standard? Heck we were even taught that in junior high. I've yet to see numbers in that format on signs, ads, or random products around though.
I'm sick of politics being about 'opinions'. Politics *isn't* about opinions. It's about reality.
Welcome to Earth. Seeing as you are new here don't upset the natives, or they will hurt you. What ever you do stay out of all discussions of religion and politics. Neither is about reality and all are just based on the opinions of the natives, which are difficult/impossible to understand.
If you can't handle that, it's advised for you to return home ASAP before a native injures you for insulting either their religion or government.
I mean really.. Do you really believe that saying that Israel behaves badly toward its neighbours and even its own citizens means you are prejudiced or hostile toward Jews? Give it up.
You know normally, I'd agree with you. I'm thinking though that they may have a point. Slashdot is anti-religion though. Slashdot is anti-all religion though. I think it's really far more anti-Christian. The entire anti-Jewish thing only comes up if Israel or Nazism is ever mentioned in a topic. Slashdot is also anti-all/most governments as well. I'd say that slashdot generally loves to pick on all religious based governments and tends to lump Israel with all the middle east as being a mostly religious state of just a different religion, which spawns conflict. Slashdot also tends to pick on all governments so it wouldn't matter what government it was; slashdot would generally be against it.
You know I'm back with agreeing with you. We are pretty much equal on whom we pick on.
But picking apart the semantics of a historical quote, and then using that to imply that the man agrees with you -- that just makes you look stupid. Honestly, do you think any of the Founding Fathers would've consented to biometrics, when they literally got up in arms over a tea tax?
You'd better believe it. They'd have been all for biometrics as long it was something in there control. The entire tax revolt thing was against non-domestic taxes being imposed on the US. Which made sense. Would you want to be paying taxes imposed by the government of China or India? Not likely if you could avoid/prevent it. Now if it was our idea to impose taxes on cargo, then you'd better believe that they'd have mostly been for a tea tax. It was the difference of the tax being imposed rather than voted on.
This is a very delicate subject, and as one Israeli to another, as we both know, if it wasn't in an anonymous internet forum I wouldn't dare raise such a question, how can you explain giving a twelfth of your life away to an organisation obsessed with harassing, repressing, dividing, locking in, shutting out, abusing and killing people for the sole reason that they lived in your country before your parents/grand-parents arrived and drove them off their land?
Um, didn't the US do the same exact thing to that native population that was already on this land mass?
Maybe pot calling the kettle black?
I can't really complain when some one does something with a military that I don't like. Heck, you could list many things that the US military does that I don't really like. I don't have much control over what any large organization of other people decide to do though.
How can you collaborate to that?
You'd find that most of us find it quite easily to do our thing. Generally, I don't make any decisions that concern Israeli or the middle east. The only resource that I buy that I know comes from that region is gas. I pretty much just ignore what my government does in that area of the world as long as I get cheap gas.
I've only listed some ways that I think Google might be able to demonstrate that the claim the road is private property might be weakened. Among those is the fact that the mere posting of a sign asserting that a road is private does not, in fact, make that road private. There is no cause-and-effect relationship between the presence of a sign installed by an individual and the status of the road.
So you think they need a gate and guards with weapons to make sure its private?
1.5 square meters * 15% * 1000 watts * 5 hours = 1125 watt/hours The average commute is 15 miles * 300 watts-hours = 4500 watt/hours consumed. Solar powered cars won't work until solar cell efficiencies are 50% or better.
I'd just say your numbers prove pure solar cars won't currently work. Hybrid solar cars apparently could reduce other power source requirements by about 1/4 by your numbers, that's if you can get the solar power equipment and the other power source all packed into the car.
We just need hybrid solar, hydrogen, gas, and CNG vehicles so the damn things could run off any of the available energy sources.
He shot me a strange look, and proceeded to punch the numbers into his calculator (including the 0% interest rate) and was surprised to get the same figure as i'd worked out in my head.
If the finance guy are a car dealership is that slow, i dread to imagine where the average person is.
I'm impressed that you can do that math in your head. Back in junior high, I might have been able to do it, but now I rarely do math unless I have to so it would take awhile for the mental gears to turn. I'd hope that the car guy's finance could tell me how much it would be per month. That's all I usually care about any way.
And that is by no means a complete list. If anything, usenet may actually return to a more usable medium again, now that it won't be free for all the spammers and trolls anymore. Then again, it may well not -- it's not like all the illegal traders will just give up and go away, so I guess it depends on how much money the **IA, the BSA, and the morality police want to spend on "eradicating the problem".
Um, we pay for an ISP to get on the net. I don't like the concept of paying again to have access to usenet, though I did like it a lot back when it was considered part of a standard ISP connection. The copyright folks worry about P2P because its "free" on top of that net connection. Is there a way you could get usenet free through P2P?
I think the big ISPs don't worry about quietly dropping usenet because there are so many other alternatives out there. They can just say use google groups or yahoo groups for most people its good enough.
Very true. On the other hand, back in the days the content was also less demanding. It is like participating in a 2008 car race with a Ford T. In its days it was great, but conditions have changed. (moderate car analogy...)
Makes me want to have a model T in every race just for base line comparison purposes. It would be really sad though if that model T won over modern cars though.
It looks like it did catch on. Just that it looks like a PDA to us. I wish the folks that make the barbie laptop would just license that, stick a barbie case on it, and sell it in the toy department here. There would need to be a hotwheels model too, but then I could get one for each of the kids.
and before you say 'but you could never get windows on an 8-bit cpu' remember that the NES was a z-80 derived product. you can have a simple, streamlined 8-bit OS and gui, that works just fine without all the HZ, and does just what you need... you could get a $10 laptop, if you really were willing to restrict it to all 8-bit software and the inherent limitations.
Forget Windows, I don't think you could get Dos or Linux to run on that though I'd love to be proved wrong.;) Makes me wonder what actually runs those little Barbie laptops though. (http://www.amazon.com/Oregon-Scientific-BG68-B-Smart-Learning/dp/B000OW4C9Y/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=toys-and-games&qid=1217521448&sr=8-1 $51.21) Would you be able to take something like that give the ability to write to a flash drive and you'd have a $50 laptop.
And, if I was Google, I'd look into the degree to which that "private road" and that property receive any kind of public support. Are police allowed on it to provide protection? The fire department? Are there beneficial tax consequences involved for someone maintaining a private road? Are any public monies used in any way in relation to that road?
This may be a foreign concept to you. Google and you aren't the government. If I owned a 1000 acres and had my own private dirt road, I'd expect 911, fire service and the utilities that I pay for. I pay those taxes and monthly bills. I don't expect companies or random people that I don't do business to wonder around my property doing whatever the hell they want!
It doesn't matter even if I get any freaking money from the government for say a windmill power plant or farm subsidy or even a tax refund! Google isn't a utility company that I do business with or has any government granted right of way to lay lines across my property. They or you have no business wondering across my hypothetical property!
It's on thing if I invite or pay some one to do something on my property. It's completely different that you want to come in and do whatever the hell you want just because you want my land or resources today. That's why I like to throw up a 50 ft wall and trench around my hypothetical 1000 acres.
So what happens once satellite photos are the same quality as photos taken from a few metres away?
Space currently has legal limits. I'm wondering if we have any legal limits on air space taken photography. Look up Pictometry and their Electronic Field Study software. My city recently bought digital photos from them. 1 ft resolution from 5 views taken all over our small town of less than 30K. Now if our population center can afford that, most others of a similar size could afford it as well. The price for buying all that photography is dropping like a rock. Wait 10 years and you could have almost weekly or monthly updated photos. I'm wondering how like it would take a UAV to stay up and take daily updated photos of the entire city.
Cost is the limiting factor. If it costs a million bucks, it might never happen. If it costs 50K, it might happen once every 10 years. If it costs 5K, it might happen every 1 year. If it costs 500, then it might be updated weekly.
If people really want "true privacy" in today's world, then they really have to never leave their house, never access the internet, never buy anything with a credit card or debit card, and don't forget your tinfoil hat.
Um, we still have privacy regardless of what google thinks. In 15-20 years, we might not, but now we do. Walk into any store and you will be recorded. Currently, no one or app reviews all that video to track you. That video is only viewed if a detected crime occurred in the store and then the police are given a copy of the video. When the tech comes cheap for any given store with security cameras to drop in an app and tie every person that entered the store with a sales receipt, known employee, or browser, or past customer, then you'll loose privacy. I'd say that's maybe 15-20 years down the road. Maybe in 5 years we'll have the hard drive space where your average home or business could keep 30-60 days of recording of anything on their property. You'll still have about the same level of privacy.
Don't worry, walmart, target, or exxon won't be sharing data with anyone else. What will happen is that you walk into a walmart or target and you'll be tracked for point of entry until you've passed through the checkout, once that happens, they'll log who you are. If you pay cash, they just have to use your photo as the ID and then track you out to the parking lot to see what vehicle you get it and tie that photo to a given license plate. It'll be difficult for all of a given chain store to intergrate all of there stores into a unified system. Once that happens though, if you are ever ID'd at any of the stores in a chain, you'll be id'd at all of them. They could then tie together your entire purchase history if they wished to.
I'm not worried about all that though. Why? Because it'd have to be incredibly cheap before they'd even think about it. You'd be able to add the same hardware/software to your home security on a lesser scale for less than 2-3K. When gated communities ever make us of this, you'll see a real lack of privacy.
Run a credit report on yourself and your name through google. That's how you can determine how invisible that you are. I and most of my coworkers are fairly invisible. We almost don't quite exist. That doesn't mean we don't use the internet or don't have utilities bills or a mortgage. (We have all that crap and their associated data trails.) It means that there currently isn't nearly as much data sharing going on as slashdot would think. (I was actually stunned at how invisible that most of us turned out to be. Of course, you are fairly invisible in the phone book as well.)
Sorry, but Windows will always be associated with BSOD in my mind. I never forgive, and I rarely forget.
And Linux will always be associated with a very painful user experience that just isn't worth the amount of effort involved. Those that like pain love Linux. I can say that I've encountered a BSOD in XP but it must have been less than a dozen times spread across 5 years and over 80 computers. To me, Win98 was BSOD. Linux is painfully annoying. Win2000 was the first really solid MS OS. WinXP made Win2000 shiny. We've not tried Vista yet.
Linux and open source has been useful but annoyingly painful.
In Britain, 999 is only for when life/health/property is in danger or a crime is in progress. If the vandalism is in progress then you should call 999, but when the crime has already happened and the perpetrators long gone you should call the police on their 'normal' number. Many people don't know the normal number, the 101 number was meant to fix that.
Well, there is nothing wrong per se with teaching the population to dial six different numbers depending on what it is. Heck, you have 999 somewhat easy 3 digit numbers you could teach the population match up to given predefined government services. It's just do you want/expect the callers to know all that, or to you want better trained operators? You don't have nearly as much control over the callers as you do over the operators. You can train the operators to handle all this crap. Can you teach the population to dial such and such given numbers? Maybe.
Slashdot Mirror
An easy explanation for developers "going rogue" is that the pay is so very very bad that the difference between unemployment and salary whilst you write the code is so small that it is not as hard a decision as in other lines of work.
I always giggle when some one asks me didn't I want to be a game developer at one point in time. My response is yes, but I like playing games, and having a home/family far more than working on/building games. I'd much rather do the routine db work that is the meat work of all business and get paid a steady decent amount. That let's me buy stuff like a home and games that I have lots and lots of free time to play. I work from 8-5 and rarely get called in after 5. If I want to spend the evening leveling in Disgaea, I can do that. I find that much more fun than working 12-16 hour days for weeks on end with no additional pay.
I tell folks that you've got to be a special sort of insane to be a game developer. I know my limits, and that I'm not wired that way. I'm wondering how many "game developers" were/are early/mid 20's males that have finally started to realize that making games isn't the same thing as playing games and have decided to personally sell out and make more money in a different setting.
PDF is a standard format that Adobe dominates with Acrobat. It's the favorite way for offices to send around read only documents that will have no chance of problems. Unless you send it to someone with Linux, in which case something funny can happen. Not so much in reading it, but if they do indeed want to make changes anyway. The SW for editing and managing PDF docs isn't so reliable on Linux, and not at all widely available. It's probably easy for IBM to fix that problem, because PDF availability for Linux isn't so bad, just needs some more "formalizing". Getting a brand name, but still open source, edition from IBM with support and training will help.
We do all our office crap in MS Office and then just print to PDF on those latitudes with standard acrobat installed. That basically freezes the document from everyone here editing it. If we want to make changes, we go back to the original MS Office doc. Why wouldn't the Linux solution be the same except for using open office instead of MS Office docs? I mean no one expects end users to edit PDFs. The best that they can do is fill out those PDF Forms, but they can't really change the form or anything. That's for the agency that made the form to do never an end user. I can't tell you how many PDF Forms that I've come across that you have to print out to fill out by hand and then either scan back into pdf or just mail in. It's an annoying step, but hey you can't get around it so you develop processes to deal with it.
...how do you get rid of IBM?
You have to have nano tech or some other magic tech that makes general business machines useless. If the only real appliance that you need is a big black replicator box, then you'd have it and very little other crap. Now, it would be likely that IBM would make the big black box, but hey you can't win all the time.
Much like the terminator, Ma Bell's shattered pieces have slowly been coming back together for the past few decades. What's worse, she's a badder bitch now than she ever was before... Much like with any disease, as the host got weaker, the viruses took over, and prospered.
Wouldn't that make AT&T a zombie Queen or would zombie hydra be more it?
One day, both the developers quit at the same time due to the manager being the biggest unlikeable bastard that any of us had ever met. This left the "database" completely unmaintained.
The manager ended up contracting a Lotus Notes expert from IBM themselves to do some emergency bug fixing. The following Monday morning, the expert turned up at 9 AM sharp, in an equally sharp suit, and carrying a trademark Thinkpad.
He sat down at a computer, looked at the code, and cried with laughter for a good, solid ten minutes, then got up and left.
See a really good contractor would have found either or both of those developers and have them work for 10x of their normal price and just be the front man. Today it's even easier. Your contractor can say, I'll need today to gather notes and talk to people "so I can give our folks in India the specs" where the folks in India are instead your former now happily highly paid employees.
Plus the first password is 12345 and the second is ABCDEFG. Half the time, I don't even have to look at the sticky note.
You haven't standardized your passwords to "Password1" yet?
This is why the government is going to have to step into health care in some way. It's in the Health Insurance company's best interests to not insurance people that are high risk. In a free market, those people will end up being uninsured.
I hate government intervention in any market, but I don't see any way around it. You can walk to the store and work. You can't perform an appendectomy on yourself.
You've also forgotten that its conveniently illegal to even own entire classes of drugs without a doctor to sign off on it. So even if you looked up stuff about a certain drug and were willing to use it, you wouldn't be able to with out a doctor's sign off on it.
How soon will health insurance be like auto insurance where they want you to have a 25K min. liability insurance if you even own a car? I'm sure that's not in all our best interest, but you know the insurance folks got those numbers set as the min in most states. What choice did we have about it? Not, much you've gotta pay the insurance tax if you want to drive.
There are days that I wish the religious people would get sick and tired of the entire insurance industry using things like acts of God to stop paying you money when you need it. I really hate the phrase Act of God as it relates to the insurance industry. (If you want to be nit picky, everything is an act of god!) I don't believe god is that active, but heck, even on the days that I do, I don't think you should be able to use god/acts of god as an excuse or a get out of payment card. Hey any pre-existing conditions that I may have are acts of god. ;) It's an act of god that I even pay insurance, yet its required to own a car and on the mortgage that I have, so I can't get out of it without being ultra rich. If I were ultra rich, I wouldn't need the damn insurance any ways.
Until they get a clue eBooks are dead in the water. (And I like mine, that should tell you something.)
I love the concept and really can't wait to get one myself. My problems is their wanting me to spend a $300-400 on a single purpose device that usually only reads their chosen format. Sure the display is great and the batteries last a long time, but I'd rather spend a few more for a laptop that can read and convert nearly any format that I happen to have. When I can spend $30-50 and get a brand new one and not a "used" or ebay one, then I'd reconsider picking one up. Until then, I'm sticking with reading on my PC.
Is that what it's about? Who came up with the lousy idea of mixing modern and ancient number systems?
Abbreviations. I hate roman numerals with a passion, but I can see why some would use them as and abbreviation for a prefix. Of course, you could always use, 1e3 instead of 1000 or 1e6 for 1000000. Why isn't that more standard? Heck we were even taught that in junior high. I've yet to see numbers in that format on signs, ads, or random products around though.
I'm sick of politics being about 'opinions'. Politics *isn't* about opinions. It's about reality.
Welcome to Earth. Seeing as you are new here don't upset the natives, or they will hurt you. What ever you do stay out of all discussions of religion and politics. Neither is about reality and all are just based on the opinions of the natives, which are difficult/impossible to understand.
If you can't handle that, it's advised for you to return home ASAP before a native injures you for insulting either their religion or government.
I mean really.. Do you really believe that saying that Israel behaves badly toward its neighbours and even its own citizens means you are prejudiced or hostile toward Jews?
Give it up.
You know normally, I'd agree with you. I'm thinking though that they may have a point. Slashdot is anti-religion though. Slashdot is anti-all religion though. I think it's really far more anti-Christian. The entire anti-Jewish thing only comes up if Israel or Nazism is ever mentioned in a topic. Slashdot is also anti-all/most governments as well. I'd say that slashdot generally loves to pick on all religious based governments and tends to lump Israel with all the middle east as being a mostly religious state of just a different religion, which spawns conflict. Slashdot also tends to pick on all governments so it wouldn't matter what government it was; slashdot would generally be against it.
You know I'm back with agreeing with you. We are pretty much equal on whom we pick on.
But picking apart the semantics of a historical quote, and then using that to imply that the man agrees with you -- that just makes you look stupid. Honestly, do you think any of the Founding Fathers would've consented to biometrics, when they literally got up in arms over a tea tax?
You'd better believe it. They'd have been all for biometrics as long it was something in there control. The entire tax revolt thing was against non-domestic taxes being imposed on the US. Which made sense. Would you want to be paying taxes imposed by the government of China or India? Not likely if you could avoid/prevent it. Now if it was our idea to impose taxes on cargo, then you'd better believe that they'd have mostly been for a tea tax. It was the difference of the tax being imposed rather than voted on.
This is a very delicate subject, and as one Israeli to another, as we both know, if it wasn't in an anonymous internet forum I wouldn't dare raise such a question, how can you explain giving a twelfth of your life away to an organisation obsessed with harassing, repressing, dividing, locking in, shutting out, abusing and killing people for the sole reason that they lived in your country before your parents/grand-parents arrived and drove them off their land?
Um, didn't the US do the same exact thing to that native population that was already on this land mass?
Maybe pot calling the kettle black?
I can't really complain when some one does something with a military that I don't like. Heck, you could list many things that the US military does that I don't really like. I don't have much control over what any large organization of other people decide to do though.
How can you collaborate to that?
You'd find that most of us find it quite easily to do our thing. Generally, I don't make any decisions that concern Israeli or the middle east. The only resource that I buy that I know comes from that region is gas. I pretty much just ignore what my government does in that area of the world as long as I get cheap gas.
I've only listed some ways that I think Google might be able to demonstrate that the claim the road is private property might be weakened. Among those is the fact that the mere posting of a sign asserting that a road is private does not, in fact, make that road private. There is no cause-and-effect relationship between the presence of a sign installed by an individual and the status of the road.
So you think they need a gate and guards with weapons to make sure its private?
1.5 square meters * 15% * 1000 watts * 5 hours = 1125 watt/hours
The average commute is 15 miles * 300 watts-hours = 4500 watt/hours consumed.
Solar powered cars won't work until solar cell efficiencies are 50% or better.
I'd just say your numbers prove pure solar cars won't currently work. Hybrid solar cars apparently could reduce other power source requirements by about 1/4 by your numbers, that's if you can get the solar power equipment and the other power source all packed into the car.
We just need hybrid solar, hydrogen, gas, and CNG vehicles so the damn things could run off any of the available energy sources.
Me: "Ok, so that's $333 a month"
He shot me a strange look, and proceeded to punch the numbers into his calculator (including the 0% interest rate) and was surprised to get the same figure as i'd worked out in my head.
If the finance guy are a car dealership is that slow, i dread to imagine where the average person is.
I'm impressed that you can do that math in your head. Back in junior high, I might have been able to do it, but now I rarely do math unless I have to so it would take awhile for the mental gears to turn. I'd hope that the car guy's finance could tell me how much it would be per month. That's all I usually care about any way.
And that is by no means a complete list. If anything, usenet may actually return to a more usable medium again, now that it won't be free for all the spammers and trolls anymore. Then again, it may well not -- it's not like all the illegal traders will just give up and go away, so I guess it depends on how much money the **IA, the BSA, and the morality police want to spend on "eradicating the problem".
Um, we pay for an ISP to get on the net. I don't like the concept of paying again to have access to usenet, though I did like it a lot back when it was considered part of a standard ISP connection. The copyright folks worry about P2P because its "free" on top of that net connection. Is there a way you could get usenet free through P2P?
I think the big ISPs don't worry about quietly dropping usenet because there are so many other alternatives out there. They can just say use google groups or yahoo groups for most people its good enough.
Very true. On the other hand, back in the days the content was also less demanding. It is like participating in a 2008 car race with a Ford T. In its days it was great, but conditions have changed. (moderate car analogy...)
Makes me want to have a model T in every race just for base line comparison purposes. It would be really sad though if that model T won over modern cars though.
Indeed, wasn't there a similar indian initiative that never really caught on?
http://www.amidasimputer.com/
It looks like it did catch on. Just that it looks like a PDA to us. I wish the folks that make the barbie laptop would just license that, stick a barbie case on it, and sell it in the toy department here. There would need to be a hotwheels model too, but then I could get one for each of the kids.
and before you say 'but you could never get windows on an 8-bit cpu' remember that the NES was a z-80 derived product. you can have a simple, streamlined 8-bit OS and gui, that works just fine without all the HZ, and does just what you need... you could get a $10 laptop, if you really were willing to restrict it to all 8-bit software and the inherent limitations.
Forget Windows, I don't think you could get Dos or Linux to run on that though I'd love to be proved wrong. ;) Makes me wonder what actually runs those little Barbie laptops though. (http://www.amazon.com/Oregon-Scientific-BG68-B-Smart-Learning/dp/B000OW4C9Y/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=toys-and-games&qid=1217521448&sr=8-1 $51.21)
Would you be able to take something like that give the ability to write to a flash drive and you'd have a $50 laptop.
And, if I was Google, I'd look into the degree to which that "private road" and that property receive any kind of public support. Are police allowed on it to provide protection? The fire department? Are there beneficial tax consequences involved for someone maintaining a private road? Are any public monies used in any way in relation to that road?
This may be a foreign concept to you. Google and you aren't the government. If I owned a 1000 acres and had my own private dirt road, I'd expect 911, fire service and the utilities that I pay for. I pay those taxes and monthly bills. I don't expect companies or random people that I don't do business to wonder around my property doing whatever the hell they want!
It doesn't matter even if I get any freaking money from the government for say a windmill power plant or farm subsidy or even a tax refund! Google isn't a utility company that I do business with or has any government granted right of way to lay lines across my property. They or you have no business wondering across my hypothetical property!
It's on thing if I invite or pay some one to do something on my property. It's completely different that you want to come in and do whatever the hell you want just because you want my land or resources today. That's why I like to throw up a 50 ft wall and trench around my hypothetical 1000 acres.
So what happens once satellite photos are the same quality as photos taken from a few metres away?
Space currently has legal limits. I'm wondering if we have any legal limits on air space taken photography. Look up Pictometry and their Electronic Field Study software. My city recently bought digital photos from them. 1 ft resolution from 5 views taken all over our small town of less than 30K. Now if our population center can afford that, most others of a similar size could afford it as well. The price for buying all that photography is dropping like a rock. Wait 10 years and you could have almost weekly or monthly updated photos. I'm wondering how like it would take a UAV to stay up and take daily updated photos of the entire city.
Cost is the limiting factor. If it costs a million bucks, it might never happen. If it costs 50K, it might happen once every 10 years. If it costs 5K, it might happen every 1 year. If it costs 500, then it might be updated weekly.
If people really want "true privacy" in today's world, then they really have to never leave their house, never access the internet, never buy anything with a credit card or debit card, and don't forget your tinfoil hat.
Um, we still have privacy regardless of what google thinks. In 15-20 years, we might not, but now we do. Walk into any store and you will be recorded. Currently, no one or app reviews all that video to track you. That video is only viewed if a detected crime occurred in the store and then the police are given a copy of the video. When the tech comes cheap for any given store with security cameras to drop in an app and tie every person that entered the store with a sales receipt, known employee, or browser, or past customer, then you'll loose privacy. I'd say that's maybe 15-20 years down the road. Maybe in 5 years we'll have the hard drive space where your average home or business could keep 30-60 days of recording of anything on their property. You'll still have about the same level of privacy.
Don't worry, walmart, target, or exxon won't be sharing data with anyone else. What will happen is that you walk into a walmart or target and you'll be tracked for point of entry until you've passed through the checkout, once that happens, they'll log who you are. If you pay cash, they just have to use your photo as the ID and then track you out to the parking lot to see what vehicle you get it and tie that photo to a given license plate. It'll be difficult for all of a given chain store to intergrate all of there stores into a unified system. Once that happens though, if you are ever ID'd at any of the stores in a chain, you'll be id'd at all of them. They could then tie together your entire purchase history if they wished to.
I'm not worried about all that though. Why? Because it'd have to be incredibly cheap before they'd even think about it. You'd be able to add the same hardware/software to your home security on a lesser scale for less than 2-3K. When gated communities ever make us of this, you'll see a real lack of privacy.
Run a credit report on yourself and your name through google. That's how you can determine how invisible that you are. I and most of my coworkers are fairly invisible. We almost don't quite exist. That doesn't mean we don't use the internet or don't have utilities bills or a mortgage. (We have all that crap and their associated data trails.) It means that there currently isn't nearly as much data sharing going on as slashdot would think. (I was actually stunned at how invisible that most of us turned out to be. Of course, you are fairly invisible in the phone book as well.)
Sorry, but Windows will always be associated with BSOD in my mind. I never forgive, and I rarely forget.
And Linux will always be associated with a very painful user experience that just isn't worth the amount of effort involved. Those that like pain love Linux. I can say that I've encountered a BSOD in XP but it must have been less than a dozen times spread across 5 years and over 80 computers. To me, Win98 was BSOD. Linux is painfully annoying. Win2000 was the first really solid MS OS. WinXP made Win2000 shiny. We've not tried Vista yet.
Linux and open source has been useful but annoyingly painful.
In Britain, 999 is only for when life/health/property is in danger or a crime is in progress. If the vandalism is in progress then you should call 999, but when the crime has already happened and the perpetrators long gone you should call the police on their 'normal' number. Many people don't know the normal number, the 101 number was meant to fix that.
Well, there is nothing wrong per se with teaching the population to dial six different numbers depending on what it is. Heck, you have 999 somewhat easy 3 digit numbers you could teach the population match up to given predefined government services. It's just do you want/expect the callers to know all that, or to you want better trained operators? You don't have nearly as much control over the callers as you do over the operators. You can train the operators to handle all this crap. Can you teach the population to dial such and such given numbers? Maybe.