You don't see them because they are expensive and cumbersome. The heating portion of the unit takes up quite a large volume of the container. What looks like a large cup of tasty hot food stuff turns out to be only a few swallows worth. As with any mechanical device placed in consumers' hands, there is a risk of malfunction; either not heating, getting too hot, leaking, not opening/dispensing, etc. It doesn't take too many of those incidents to get a significant number of disgruntled customers. Disgruntled customers tend to share their experience with others who then don't buy.
A similar fate became of the self-cooling soda cans. They couldn't change the size of the container since all the vending machines were built for the standard can size. That meant there was less soda in the can since it was displaced by the cooling apparatus. Same price, less soda = unhappy customer. Turns out it's cheaper to run the refrigeration system to keep the cans cool than invent/impliment per-can cooling.
The only place these self-heating, self-cooling gizmos are really in demand is in military environments. aNd then the temperature unit and food product are two separate parts to minimize waste due to failure (among other reasons).
Several things to note about the FDCPA and this "drop dead" letter:
1. It does not pertain to the creditor (the people who claim you owe them money), only to 3rd party debt collectors. If you owe money to Wired magazine and they are attempting to collect that debt directly, then they are not subject to FDCPA.
2. Sending this letter to a 3rd party collection agency does not in any way make the collection of that debt stop. It simply moves things to the next level: civil charges (you get sued). When you send such a "drop dead" letter to a collection agency they attorney assign your account. The first thing the attorney's office will do is add some exorbitant charges for copying, reviewing and processing the paperwork and filing the court papers. Expect these charges to run from $500 to $7000 depending on the debt, state and attorney.
3. Even under FDCPA a debt collector may contact you up to three more times to tell you each of these things. Leaving a message on your answering machine is not considered "contact" since they don't know if they are speaking to the debtor or the debtor is getting the message.
If you owe a debt, the best way to deal with it is to deal honestly with the original firm you owe, and work out a reasonable payment plan. In most cases ignoring debt collection requests will simply yield you larger debts and more stress.
It's not REAL property, it's INTELLECTUAL property that a patent grants you. Someone else using your intellectual property does not in any way deprive you of using it yourself. If my using your patented idea were like taking real property, then my using the idea would cause you to no longer have the idea yourself. That clearly is not the case.
To all you DV editors out there.... SAVE YOUR SOURCE MATERIAL. There is zero need to back up the video data on your hard drive if you save the raw footage reel(s). Chances are that if you restore a project from backup that you'll be doing more editing which would make any temporary render files useless anyway.
Even a complex project's EDL or project file won't be more than a few dozen megabytes, meaning you could fit several years worth of project data to a single DVD-R.
Kept in a reasonable environment DV tape is going to have more longevity than optical media and perhaps HD. Remember, if you ever get data corruption or broken tape with DV, you only loose the affected frames. The rest of the tape can be imported since each frame is self-contained. There are no directory areas, no file headers, no allocation tables, etc.
While the white color of the siding will reflect more sunlight than a darker color, we're only talking about white light when we talk about color . Infrared is what causes most heat absorption, and infrared absorption can be completely irrelevant to color. The fact that the siding is metal means the heat that is absorbed is more easily conducted and/or radiated through the siding to the wall structure.
If the interior walls are plaster or block then they can hold quite a bit of heat that will radiate outward over the course of the evening. Lighter wall materials like gypsum board will not hold has much heat and the house will cool faster once the sun sets.
Hanging a shade off the western eaves will probably do wonders for keeping the house cool. Without direct sun hitting the house the interior would not get much above ambient outside temperatures, other factors excluded.
Your roof is only one part of the issue, probably a minor one if your have an attic.
During the daytime the sun warms the roof and walls of a house. The surfaces most perpendicular to the Suns rays will get hotter, faster.
In the morning the sun is low in the sky and the light rays are mostly perpendicular to the house walls. Since the air is still relatively cool from the night period, the heat imparted to the walls is mostly released back to the atmosphere.
For the mid-day the walls are washed in light mostly parallel to the walls, but the roof is heated quite a bit. With an attic and proper insulation and ventilation, most of this heat will be released back to the atmosphere.
In the afternoon/evening the sun is again low in the sky an the rays are again perpendicular to the house wall, causing them to heat up. Now, though, the atmosphere around the walls is also warm so less of this heat is released back to the atmosphere outside the house and instead finds it in to the home . Heat is conducted to the interior walls and then to the air in the house. Additionally heat is radiated from the interior wall surfaces to the occupants causing people to feel warmer than the thermostat reading would imply.
The radiation portion of that scenario is why opening the windows does not alleviate your warm feeling and cooling the roof does not help much.
If you were to run water down the west walls instead of the roof during the afternoon you could remove the accumulating heat. Better yet shade those walls, you would go a long way to keeping cooler. Another option is to more heavily insulate the western walls, building up their thickness if necessary. Shade is the most efficient way of keeping cool, you remove the heat before it gets to the home and either release the heat to the atmosphere, or let plants convert it to food.
All the facts to date point to the Intel chips that will be used in Macs to be stock Pentium chips. No-one on stage mentioned Intel and Apple developing custom silicon. I hope to hell they ARE developing custom screens though, otherwise I don't know where this gets us"
1. PPC to Pentium we loose the "Velocity Engine". Intel's SSE sucks and the Altivec cores in the G4 and G5 processors are what made them scream for multimedia.
2. PPC to Pentium does nothing to lower the cost of the system. Apple won't make more margin and consumer's won't pay less.
3. PPC to Pentium does nothing to lower the heat output of the system.
4. Pentium CPUs are incapable of SMP (at least the stock ones). That means no more dual processor systems, and I know from experience that dual procs are the shit for high load tasks.
5. Pentium 64 is a brand new and unproven technology. Intel's history with creating and producing 64bit chips is dismal (Itanium anyone?)
6. 10 vs 70 "performance units per watt". What the hell is a "performance unit"?? The amount of heat generated per watt of input power?
It's VERY telling to me that during the keynote we saw a demo of Mathmatica running on Intel based Macs but we DIDN'T see a head-to-head comparison of that same code base between the Intel and PPC based systems.
I'm hoping that the P4 3.6 developer systems are simply testbeds for people to get their code ported and tested while the real silicon for the Apple systems is produced.
If the chip is not going to be custom, then why spend the $$ for Macintosh over Windows? Apple will have zero speed advantage, zero cost advantage, and if Microsoft gets things even close to right this time, zero virus/security advantage. I'm all for style, but not when it lacks substance.
People say that moving to x86 gives Apple the ability to leverage Intel against AMD. Big deal, that didn't help at all when Apple had Motorola and IBM to battle leverage against each other. We just wound up with both of them being laggards.
I just don't see how this is is a positive step in any way. Sure IBM made Steve look like a shmuck by not delivering on the 3Ghz promise. NOTHING said in the keynote today made any sense to me, whatsoever.
My next Mac will be whatever the last PPC based PoweMac will be. I think it will be a LONG time after that before I purchase another Mac.
The issue was never OpenGL itself. The issue is that Windows game developers use DirectX and that API still will not be available on the Mac, even when it runs on an x86 platform.
The other option is to purchase high-quality SERVERS. I'm not generally speaking about x86 based systems here. If purchase servers that have N+1 redundant hot-swapable power supplies you are significantly likely to notice an option of a power supply that has -48v DC inputs instead of AC line current. These things are a beauty to use.
These supplies are routinely used in col-lo type facilities, especially in telco based systems. For both reliability and thermal issues.
I've not read the entire article you reference, but perhaps you should. To quote the relevant parts:
The simplest HEV can be thought of as a battery-powered electric vehicle that also has a small engine/alternator that operates on fuels. An electric motor provides torque to the drive wheels for acceleration as well as for braking. The electric motor controller responds to signals from both the brake pedal and the accelerator, controlling energy flow to and from the vehicle battery pack.
In other words, if you want to build a brain-dead simple vehicle,then yes you use reverse motor power to slow the vehicle.
From elsewhere in the article:
Brakes that last the life of the vehicle are possible because regenerative braking absorbs part of the total brake load and lowers the peak brake loads to much less stressful levels.
This is where the technology is today; regenerative breaking. Why expend energy to slow down when you can make energy by slowing down?
Stopping quickly does not cause any more friction than stopping slowly. All of the car's deceleration is caused by friction; it's just a matter of where that friction happens and to what degree. Stopping quickly causes the friction to happen in a shorter period of time and mostly in the active braking components (rotors,pads,etc.).
The difference is that with shorter time frames in active braking the heat generated is not able to dissipate to the atmosphere as fast as it is generated, causing higher temperatures of the brake components. High temperatures then lead to premature wear of the heated parts as the hot parts are less tolerant of the added stresses of hard braking. Hard braking also means that you were maintaining engine power longer than necessary, and thus wasting fuel.
Hybrid cars don't use energy from the "electric engine" to slow the car. The inertia of the car is used to drive the electric motor, turning the motor in to a generator. The resistance caused by the electrical generation is itself a braking force. The motor is not producing power for braking, it's producing power from braking and using that power to charge the batteries.
All that said, you conclusion is correct: hard acceleration and braking are energy/fuel wasters. Constant speed cruising is the most fuel efficient driving method. Learning to drive so that you take your foot off the accelerator and coast for about 1/2 your deceleration then apply braking is a terrific way to decrease fuel consumption. It's one of the ways I average 43MPG in my VW Golf TDI.
Funny, the police in the US manage to stop thousands of cars every year without firing potentially dozens of machine gun rounds in to the vehicles. Stop sticks, ESD discharges, cement blockades, etc.
You know the "wrong people" by not shooting first then asking questions later.
"Says who?": common sense. When you are there to liberate a people and to provide for their security your first reaction should not be to shoot them all to death. It didn't work for Churchhill when he decided to randomly drop poison gas bombs on the Iraqi's just to "keep them in line", it's not going to work for us.
It is the responsibility of the military occupiers with the weapons to make sure they don't shoot the wrong people. We are SUPPOSED to be bringing freedom to these people, your solution tends toward total fascism like Nazi Germany or Socialist Russia where you must show travel papers at every turn or be shot on sight.
The "rules" of AppleCare don't state that the monitor has to be able to work with the machine, just purchased at the same time. While it makes no sense, and Apple may re-word things in the future, the AppleCare agreement does indeed allow you to purchase a 30" display and cover it under the Mac Mini's AppleCare umbrella. You are in essence paying $650 for a warranty on your Cinema Display, but then again one repair would allow you to recoup the entire cost.
There is no federal law that requires acceptance of cash as payment of a debt. It's up to local (state, county, city) jurisdictions to enact such laws themselves.
What's ironic is that the money crime committed here was by the Best Buy employee. Title 18 Section 333 of the United States code makes it a crime to deface currency in any way so as to make the currency unfit to be re-issued. If this employee did in fact mark "counterfeit" on the bills, then those bills are ostensibly no longer able to be issued as currency.
That employee could be looking at up to 6 months in prison!
They are still available because they never make it to the Federal Reserve banks. The FR banks scan incoming currency for wear or age and remove offending bills from circulation, replacing the bills with newly printed bills to equal the quantity of removed currency.
Banks, knowing the novelty value, ensure that the $2 bills are not sent to the FR and instead horde the bills for distribution to customers
This is also true of the $500, $1,000, $5,000 and $10,000 bills. The $100,000 bill was never circulated to the public. If you had a $5,000 bill, you could still spend it today as legal tender.
Well... "the mint" doesn't make paper money. The U.S. Mint makes our coins. The Bureau of Engraving & Printing makes the paper money (and stamps among other things).
Theft of service is a crime in most states. If you use a service and don't pay for it you can be arrested by the police and charged with a crime. In Arizona it's a felony, even if the amount is only one cent.
In this case he used the installation service and was being asked to pay for it.
Yes, I do "get it". The shuttle was supposed to be a re-usable vehicle. It failed at that goal.
Every launch requires a new liquid fuel tank. Every launch the SRB units must be retrieved and re-built before another use. After each flight the STA must essentially be rebuilt. Insulating tiles fall off, thrusters are rebuilt, etc.
The question becomes "would it have been faster, safer and/or cheaper to have built the STS system to be disposable and just build lots more of them". I think there are several strong indications for that course, not the least of which is the relative success of NASA's "faster, better, cheaper" mantra.
The Apollo missions were all carried out with cutting edge technology for their time and they were just as safe or failure prone (depending on your point of view) as the much more expensive space shuttle program.
The Apollo program achieved all of its goals in allowing for frequent human missions to space and the moon. The Space Shuttle has failed in most of its design goals; if you don't recall, the program was designed to put a shuttle in to orbit 10 times a year for 10 years each ferrying inhabitants and materials to a space station. Each shuttle was supposed to last for 100 flights and there were 5 shuttles, the math show then that there should have been 500 shuttle flights between 1981 and today. To date I think there have been 103; that's pathetic.
The space station the shuttle was to shuttle to and from a space station, itself a joke. Over budget, less than half the designed volume, less than 1/5 the designed occupancy, the science it produces is negligible and could (for the most part) be performed via robotics.
NASA screwed the pooch on these programs. Am I playing monday morning quarterback? Sure, but these were NASA's top priority missions. They had the greatest visibility, funding and brain-trust. Why have a partially re-usable space shuttle that has to be dismantled, inspected and refurbished after each flight. How is this any better than mostly expendable vehicles? The space shuttle is not a product of engineers, it's a product of politicians and special interests.
Who do I blame? The politicians. The elected ones and the middle and upper management in NASA. If NASA was properly/well funded and the managers just let the engineers do what they do, things would likely be very much better off.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't see them because they are expensive and cumbersome. The heating portion of the unit takes up quite a large volume of the container. What looks like a large cup of tasty hot food stuff turns out to be only a few swallows worth.
As with any mechanical device placed in consumers' hands, there is a risk of malfunction; either not heating, getting too hot, leaking, not opening/dispensing, etc. It doesn't take too many of those incidents to get a significant number of disgruntled customers. Disgruntled customers tend to share their experience with others who then don't buy.
A similar fate became of the self-cooling soda cans. They couldn't change the size of the container since all the vending machines were built for the standard can size. That meant there was less soda in the can since it was displaced by the cooling apparatus. Same price, less soda = unhappy customer. Turns out it's cheaper to run the refrigeration system to keep the cans cool than invent/impliment per-can cooling.
The only place these self-heating, self-cooling gizmos are really in demand is in military environments. aNd then the temperature unit and food product are two separate parts to minimize waste due to failure (among other reasons).
Several things to note about the FDCPA and this "drop dead" letter:
1. It does not pertain to the creditor (the people who claim you owe them money), only to 3rd party debt collectors. If you owe money to Wired magazine and they are attempting to collect that debt directly, then they are not subject to FDCPA.
2. Sending this letter to a 3rd party collection agency does not in any way make the collection of that debt stop. It simply moves things to the next level: civil charges (you get sued). When you send such a "drop dead" letter to a collection agency they attorney assign your account. The first thing the attorney's office will do is add some exorbitant charges for copying, reviewing and processing the paperwork and filing the court papers. Expect these charges to run from $500 to $7000 depending on the debt, state and attorney.
3. Even under FDCPA a debt collector may contact you up to three more times to tell you each of these things. Leaving a message on your answering machine is not considered "contact" since they don't know if they are speaking to the debtor or the debtor is getting the message.
If you owe a debt, the best way to deal with it is to deal honestly with the original firm you owe, and work out a reasonable payment plan. In most cases ignoring debt collection requests will simply yield you larger debts and more stress.
Because most of those proxies are running without the machine owner's permission or even knowledge.
It's not REAL property, it's INTELLECTUAL property that a patent grants you. Someone else using your intellectual property does not in any way deprive you of using it yourself.
If my using your patented idea were like taking real property, then my using the idea would cause you to no longer have the idea yourself. That clearly is not the case.
Bingo!
I wish I had mod points instead of replying.
To all you DV editors out there.... SAVE YOUR SOURCE MATERIAL. There is zero need to back up the video data on your hard drive if you save the raw footage reel(s). Chances are that if you restore a project from backup that you'll be doing more editing which would make any temporary render files useless anyway.
Even a complex project's EDL or project file won't be more than a few dozen megabytes, meaning you could fit several years worth of project data to a single DVD-R.
Kept in a reasonable environment DV tape is going to have more longevity than optical media and perhaps HD. Remember, if you ever get data corruption or broken tape with DV, you only loose the affected frames. The rest of the tape can be imported since each frame is self-contained. There are no directory areas, no file headers, no allocation tables, etc.
While the white color of the siding will reflect more sunlight than a darker color, we're only talking about white light when we talk about color . Infrared is what causes most heat absorption, and infrared absorption can be completely irrelevant to color. The fact that the siding is metal means the heat that is absorbed is more easily conducted and/or radiated through the siding to the wall structure.
If the interior walls are plaster or block then they can hold quite a bit of heat that will radiate outward over the course of the evening. Lighter wall materials like gypsum board will not hold has much heat and the house will cool faster once the sun sets.
Hanging a shade off the western eaves will probably do wonders for keeping the house cool. Without direct sun hitting the house the interior would not get much above ambient outside temperatures, other factors excluded.
Your roof is only one part of the issue, probably a minor one if your have an attic.
During the daytime the sun warms the roof and walls of a house. The surfaces most perpendicular to the Suns rays will get hotter, faster.
In the morning the sun is low in the sky and the light rays are mostly perpendicular to the house walls. Since the air is still relatively cool from the night period, the heat imparted to the walls is mostly released back to the atmosphere.
For the mid-day the walls are washed in light mostly parallel to the walls, but the roof is heated quite a bit. With an attic and proper insulation and ventilation, most of this heat will be released back to the atmosphere.
In the afternoon/evening the sun is again low in the sky an the rays are again perpendicular to the house wall, causing them to heat up. Now, though, the atmosphere around the walls is also warm so less of this heat is released back to the atmosphere outside the house and instead finds it in to the home . Heat is conducted to the interior walls and then to the air in the house. Additionally heat is radiated from the interior wall surfaces to the occupants causing people to feel warmer than the thermostat reading would imply.
The radiation portion of that scenario is why opening the windows does not alleviate your warm feeling and cooling the roof does not help much.
If you were to run water down the west walls instead of the roof during the afternoon you could remove the accumulating heat. Better yet shade those walls, you would go a long way to keeping cooler. Another option is to more heavily insulate the western walls, building up their thickness if necessary.
Shade is the most efficient way of keeping cool, you remove the heat before it gets to the home and either release the heat to the atmosphere, or let plants convert it to food.
When I double-click ShufflePuck Cafe, my x86 based OS X Mac will emulate the a PPC based OS X Mac emulating OS 9 emulating a 68K based Mac.
Or will it?
All the facts to date point to the Intel chips that will be used in Macs to be stock Pentium chips. No-one on stage mentioned Intel and Apple developing custom silicon. I hope to hell they ARE developing custom screens though, otherwise I don't know where this gets us"
1. PPC to Pentium we loose the "Velocity Engine". Intel's SSE sucks and the Altivec cores in the G4 and G5 processors are what made them scream for multimedia.
2. PPC to Pentium does nothing to lower the cost of the system. Apple won't make more margin and consumer's won't pay less.
3. PPC to Pentium does nothing to lower the heat output of the system.
4. Pentium CPUs are incapable of SMP (at least the stock ones). That means no more dual processor systems, and I know from experience that dual procs are the shit for high load tasks.
5. Pentium 64 is a brand new and unproven technology. Intel's history with creating and producing 64bit chips is dismal (Itanium anyone?)
6. 10 vs 70 "performance units per watt". What the hell is a "performance unit"?? The amount of heat generated per watt of input power?
It's VERY telling to me that during the keynote we saw a demo of Mathmatica running on Intel based Macs but we DIDN'T see a head-to-head comparison of that same code base between the Intel and PPC based systems.
I'm hoping that the P4 3.6 developer systems are simply testbeds for people to get their code ported and tested while the real silicon for the Apple systems is produced.
If the chip is not going to be custom, then why spend the $$ for Macintosh over Windows? Apple will have zero speed advantage, zero cost advantage, and if Microsoft gets things even close to right this time, zero virus/security advantage. I'm all for style, but not when it lacks substance.
People say that moving to x86 gives Apple the ability to leverage Intel against AMD. Big deal, that didn't help at all when Apple had Motorola and IBM to battle leverage against each other. We just wound up with both of them being laggards.
I just don't see how this is is a positive step in any way. Sure IBM made Steve look like a shmuck by not delivering on the 3Ghz promise. NOTHING said in the keynote today made any sense to me, whatsoever.
My next Mac will be whatever the last PPC based PoweMac will be. I think it will be a LONG time after that before I purchase another Mac.
The issue was never OpenGL itself. The issue is that Windows game developers use DirectX and that API still will not be available on the Mac, even when it runs on an x86 platform.
The other option is to purchase high-quality SERVERS. I'm not generally speaking about x86 based systems here. If purchase servers that have N+1 redundant hot-swapable power supplies you are significantly likely to notice an option of a power supply that has -48v DC inputs instead of AC line current. These things are a beauty to use.
These supplies are routinely used in col-lo type facilities, especially in telco based systems. For both reliability and thermal issues.
In other words, if you want to build a brain-dead simple vehicle,then yes you use reverse motor power to slow the vehicle.
From elsewhere in the article:
This is where the technology is today; regenerative breaking. Why expend energy to slow down when you can make energy by slowing down?
Stopping quickly does not cause any more friction than stopping slowly. All of the car's deceleration is caused by friction; it's just a matter of where that friction happens and to what degree. Stopping quickly causes the friction to happen in a shorter period of time and mostly in the active braking components (rotors,pads,etc.).
The difference is that with shorter time frames in active braking the heat generated is not able to dissipate to the atmosphere as fast as it is generated, causing higher temperatures of the brake components. High temperatures then lead to premature wear of the heated parts as the hot parts are less tolerant of the added stresses of hard braking. Hard braking also means that you were maintaining engine power longer than necessary, and thus wasting fuel.
Hybrid cars don't use energy from the "electric engine" to slow the car. The inertia of the car is used to drive the electric motor, turning the motor in to a generator. The resistance caused by the electrical generation is itself a braking force. The motor is not producing power for braking, it's producing power from braking and using that power to charge the batteries.
All that said, you conclusion is correct: hard acceleration and braking are energy/fuel wasters. Constant speed cruising is the most fuel efficient driving method. Learning to drive so that you take your foot off the accelerator and coast for about 1/2 your deceleration then apply braking is a terrific way to decrease fuel consumption. It's one of the ways I average 43MPG in my VW Golf TDI.
No.
Funny, the police in the US manage to stop thousands of cars every year without firing potentially dozens of machine gun rounds in to the vehicles. Stop sticks, ESD discharges, cement blockades, etc.
You know the "wrong people" by not shooting first then asking questions later.
"Says who?": common sense. When you are there to liberate a people and to provide for their security your first reaction should not be to shoot them all to death. It didn't work for Churchhill when he decided to randomly drop poison gas bombs on the Iraqi's just to "keep them in line", it's not going to work for us.
I really don't understand that mentality at all.
It is the responsibility of the military occupiers with the weapons to make sure they don't shoot the wrong people. We are SUPPOSED to be bringing freedom to these people, your solution tends toward total fascism like Nazi Germany or Socialist Russia where you must show travel papers at every turn or be shot on sight.
:) Not many people know that. The ENTIRE 127 A block is reserved for loopback!
Perhaps even lesser known is that on most *nix based systems you can omit two of the numbers; ping 127.1 works just as well.
The "rules" of AppleCare don't state that the monitor has to be able to work with the machine, just purchased at the same time. While it makes no sense, and Apple may re-word things in the future, the AppleCare agreement does indeed allow you to purchase a 30" display and cover it under the Mac Mini's AppleCare umbrella.
You are in essence paying $650 for a warranty on your Cinema Display, but then again one repair would allow you to recoup the entire cost.
There is no federal law that requires acceptance of cash as payment of a debt. It's up to local (state, county, city) jurisdictions to enact such laws themselves.
What's ironic is that the money crime committed here was by the Best Buy employee. Title 18 Section 333 of the United States code makes it a crime to deface currency in any way so as to make the currency unfit to be re-issued. If this employee did in fact mark "counterfeit" on the bills, then those bills are ostensibly no longer able to be issued as currency.
That employee could be looking at up to 6 months in prison!
They are still available because they never make it to the Federal Reserve banks. The FR banks scan incoming currency for wear or age and remove offending bills from circulation, replacing the bills with newly printed bills to equal the quantity of removed currency.
Banks, knowing the novelty value, ensure that the $2 bills are not sent to the FR and instead horde the bills for distribution to customers
This is also true of the $500, $1,000, $5,000 and $10,000 bills. The $100,000 bill was never circulated to the public. If you had a $5,000 bill, you could still spend it today as legal tender.
Well... "the mint" doesn't make paper money. The U.S. Mint makes our coins.
The Bureau of Engraving & Printing makes the paper money (and stamps among other things).
Theft of service is a crime in most states. If you use a service and don't pay for it you can be arrested by the police and charged with a crime. In Arizona it's a felony, even if the amount is only one cent.
In this case he used the installation service and was being asked to pay for it.
Yes, I do "get it". The shuttle was supposed to be a re-usable vehicle. It failed at that goal.
Every launch requires a new liquid fuel tank. Every launch the SRB units must be retrieved and re-built before another use. After each flight the STA must essentially be rebuilt. Insulating tiles fall off, thrusters are rebuilt, etc.
The question becomes "would it have been faster, safer and/or cheaper to have built the STS system to be disposable and just build lots more of them". I think there are several strong indications for that course, not the least of which is the relative success of NASA's "faster, better, cheaper" mantra.
The Apollo missions were all carried out with cutting edge technology for their time and they were just as safe or failure prone (depending on your point of view) as the much more expensive space shuttle program.
The Apollo program achieved all of its goals in allowing for frequent human missions to space and the moon. The Space Shuttle has failed in most of its design goals; if you don't recall, the program was designed to put a shuttle in to orbit 10 times a year for 10 years each ferrying inhabitants and materials to a space station. Each shuttle was supposed to last for 100 flights and there were 5 shuttles, the math show then that there should have been 500 shuttle flights between 1981 and today. To date I think there have been 103; that's pathetic.
The space station the shuttle was to shuttle to and from a space station, itself a joke. Over budget, less than half the designed volume, less than 1/5 the designed occupancy, the science it produces is negligible and could (for the most part) be performed via robotics.
NASA screwed the pooch on these programs. Am I playing monday morning quarterback? Sure, but these were NASA's top priority missions. They had the greatest visibility, funding and brain-trust. Why have a partially re-usable space shuttle that has to be dismantled, inspected and refurbished after each flight. How is this any better than mostly expendable vehicles? The space shuttle is not a product of engineers, it's a product of politicians and special interests.
Who do I blame? The politicians. The elected ones and the middle and upper management in NASA. If NASA was properly/well funded and the managers just let the engineers do what they do, things would likely be very much better off.