I've got a product for you that will revolutionize how you do business. Its called voicemail, and it allows you to send a digitized voice recording to anyone with a compatible receiver. You get notified when one comes in, and you can even speak to the person immediately if they're available. If not your message is saved so that they can listen to it as many times as they like. Even better - this "voicemail" system can even let the caller leave a message for you - letting you know, say, they're on the road all day, and how often you can expect them to chech their messages.
Its amazing...you ought to try it some time!
(On the serious side, I never SMS, partially because of the exhorbitant fees associated vs everything else being included in my basic rate, and partially because I am rarely in a situation where I need to communicate in an environment too noisy for voice communication.)
Until you make a stink about somthing, most of the sheeple wont care. This is about poking The Man to see if he reacts. The current political climate is to try and trump anonymity at every position. Most of the time it doesn't matter, so most people figure that it wont affect them.
The hope is that the government will squash this idea, resulting in some privacy "buzz" in the media. Somehting to counteract the stop-terrorism-by-burning-the-constitution "buzz" which has dominated the discussion so far.
I suppose it depends on where you live. I get fixed rate electricity - about 6c/kWh - 24h/day. I would guess most chargers would pull 100A/240V in order to provide a full charge in a reasonable amount of time.
Say 40HP avg for 4 hours, about 240 miles, is 120kWh. 120,000Wh / 8H charge time / 80% conversion & storage efficiency = 18,650W. at 240V, that'll be 78A of draw. That's about right - a 100A circuit should do it. Pretty heavy charge needs, if you ask me. (My 1962 house has a 100A main service, BTW, and is typical for homes of that era. Most modern 2500-SF spec homes will come with a single 200A panel.)
For a reality check, the Prius has a 67HP electric "drivetrain" and has a top speed of 105ish MPH. A 40HP average drain on a 65-70mph highway is not unlikely under real-world conditions (I may be off 20 or 30%, but that's always good enough for/.)
No, you can't. As a consumer, I want it charged when I plug it in. What if I need to run back out later, but before my scheduled $LEAVE_TIME and there's no charge?
How long would it take for folks - especially those here on/. - to hack their charger for instant on. Or simply set the next $LEAVE_TIME=$NOW+$CHARGETIME.
Nope, charging is one of the great drawbacks of electric (only) cars.
No, it won't. Dicks.com will be mapped to Dicks.xxx - the transition will be instantaneous and seamless. You don't really think those sites are going to give up their coveted.com net real estate, do you?
No, on the surface this is a big waste of money. In black and white, this will not come to pass. We, as a country, don't have the risk tolerance to go to Mars. There may be funding but it wont be enough and the schedule will slip until they mothball it. We already have $7T in debt and are running a deficit each year which seems to be growing without bound. Nobody is going to find an extra $200B per year for the next decade to properly fund this kind of endeavor. Not even the leader of the majority party. Heck, even W has started to realize that he can't just spend at will.
Quite honestly, I wish we had a kick-ass space program, a better funded national park system, a more proactive (non-petrolium based) energy policy, and a much more isolationist military philosophy. But I'd still rather have a balanced 3-year budget process and a National Debt that is a fraction of the annual budget.
Thanks for the info. I use FF in a "production" environment, so I won't be trying it just yet, but its good to know that this "feature" is on the horizon. There have been times the going back and printing an invoice page with a discount which was mystriously not included in the final payment invoice has asved me some cash. Not to mention the doing page searches from a slow server...I hate having to wait for the re-post and server-side app to execute again.
(We've come a long way from the early 90s, when you actually had to wait for jpgs to load 'cause the processors could do the DCTs only so fast)
And for a cancer detection firm in Utah, it ahs paid off. They "patented" a gene sequence which tests for the likelihood of breast cancer (I think). Note that they didn't patent the test process, but the information in the gene. Now, no matter what process you use to determine the condition of the gene, you cannot use it for cancer detection wihtout paying a $10k fee to that company. They "own" the exclusive right to the "data". Sort of like patenting moon-dogs as a predictor of coming precipitation, or the presence of a high pressure as a predicter of clear weather. They're natural facts, observable by anyone with the proper instuments. But they're patentable now. (iirc, Canada got into trouble over the cancer detection thing).
**note: this is all from memory of a (single?) online news story quite some time ago, the facts may be significantly different that I have implied**
Lets face it - Patent holders, as technical intellectual property creators, have been falling behind the protections afforded to their artistic bretheren! Copyright holders now have an entire century to reap the benfits, adn for their offspring to reap the benefits, of their labors. It seems wholely unfair to limit patents to such short terms as 14 years (20 for non-design).
I believe patents should be perpetual. Once you create it it should be your forever! And you children and your childrens children. We have seen my the slow - nay, slowing pace (based on patents per dollar spent on healthcare)- of patent applications and inventions in the 20th century that patent protection does not provide the needed impetus for our truly creative technical experts to advance the sciences.
There are numerous cases of inventors who could have changed the world, but insted of licencing their technology, compaies just waited until the patents ran out, and the used those iventions with no compensation to the creative mind whatsoever.
This must stop. We all must rise up and demand perpetual patents now.
(aren't you glad there isn't a _really_ organized lobby for patent holders like there is for performance artists?)
Wow, 240 days sucks. No wonder the Japanese are workaholics. Even in the US, where long work weeks and low vacation leave are the norm, no full time, skilled worker would consider a job with less than 20 days off in a year (usu 8-10 "holidays", with 10 being the gov't norm, 10 days of paid vacation, and 5-10 days of sick leave. Most workers with more than 10-12 years will get an extra week or two on top of those numbers).
Well, at least one of his charater portrayals - from Parenthood:
"Ya know, you need a license to buy a dog, or drive a car. Hell, you need a license to catch a fish, but they'll let any butt-reaming asshole have a kid"
It's amazing how many parents are completely unprepared for the responsibility of raising a child. I thought that maybe I just had a good kid, and the other parents had "normal" kids that wouldn't listen. Until I went to a family reunion a few weeks ago. Most of my cousins have kids ranging from 2 to 13 years old. I happen to know that (with one exception) they are very active in their kids lives, and don't put up with slacking/rudeness. I don't think I've ever seen such a well behaved group. Oh, sure, there were moments, but on the whole they were careful to include the little kids in their games, played nicely with one another, had a good time, and actually _listened_ when their parents - or any parent - asked them to do something. I went from thinking that we just had a "good" kid, to realizing that there are just a lot of lousy parents out there.
Darned, I was hoping they were implementing the Opera back/forward action, where the page is simply redrawn, for lack of the proper term, as the page you saw, rather than re-executed or re-downloaded. In Opera, the page redraws were so fast as to be unnoticable, and there were no data-post limitations. It was a snapshot rather than a reload. Of course, if you wanted to, you could just reload the page manually to re-invoke the post (or whatever actually happened on the page)
Yeah, I read that too. There's no "burning of a CD" as is Compact Disc Digital Audio. It's simply burning a WMA disc. Why bother? Most CD players won't read WMA. I'm pretty sure that even my 2 year old Sony (MP3) changer in my car won't read it, much less my in-dash player. This seems to be protecting content from a diminishingly small market segment.
What's even sillier is that the "kids" (aka Playground Pirates) who they appear to eb targeting are generally smart enough to get around just about anything. They have no money, but gobs of free time.
Now, if this is meant to prevent the over-40 set from swapping discs with their grey-templed friends in thier "new-fangled" Crutchfield toy, then they're on to something. Of course, most oflks that old still like the cover art and physical presence of the original media, so I don't think there;s much call for copies. Especially when you're taking about folks who usually make near or in the 6 figures.
Oddly enough, they do fly themselves. It's the take-off and landing where they can't do without the humans.
Although I fly fairly rarely, if faced with a long screeners line and an empty portal with a fellow taking $5 bills to just walk right on, I'd find my wallet pretty fast. Especiallly since, in "my" plane, there'd be trained marshalls, just in case.
I know that not everyone would agree with me, but we're already paying a tax to cover the TSA screeners. Why not just roll that over. One of the advantages is that "everyone" pays the bill, so its not like certain airlines would be at a disadvantage. Air Traffic passenger volumnes are back to pre-9-11 levels, so the higher prices due to taxes and fuel surcharges (hidden, but there) are not preventing folks from flying.
I mean, that's what they've been telling us. Its not the casual one-on-one that's cutting into sales, but the semi-anonymous sharing of files over p2p networks that is costing them so much revenue.
If you could convice Michael Dell that he could sell twenty or thirty thousand, you might get him to box up a Precision M70 for you. I've got one right now, and its my main CAD station - 1.86GHz PM / 100GB drive / 2G DDR2 / 256MB nVidia QuadroFX 1400. Its on ly drawbacks are: no dedicated memory card slots and no DVI on the lappy itself (it's on the port rep, but I use the built in monitor at 1920x1200). I would think they could easily squeeze the innards into a mac-mini sized box.
What date identifier does it get? Photo taken, mp3 ripped? Moved on system? Touched? What about bad identifiers? Heck I think I've got a mess of MP3s that are only identified by their rip date and filename, cause the cddb didn't get the info correct.
On the contrary, it is the opposite of a placebo. It is meant to keep you fearful. Fearful people are more easily led...in whichever direction you inform them is "safe."
Sheep, I tell you. We are surrouded by sheep. And when the heard moves, you move too, or you get trampled. Sometimes I wonder if it was even wise for me to bring a child into this world.
Do you have aby idea what pilots make? Adding a pair of security gaurds, even well paid ones, would add a relatively small amount of cost. Figure $65k for a four day work week and two flights a day (avg 3h ea), that's only $500* a flight - about $2.50 per paying seat on anything larger than a commuter (which probably would be exempt).
*4 day week allows for the elimintation of specified "holidays", essentally reducing the labor burden. The number cited includes 40% labor burden plus 10% O&P.
Craven is a visionary, he just comes up with the brilliant ideas and lets the "business" people sort out the details. People like Craven bug me because they never finish what they start, and are never around when the "hard" science has to be reconciled with the business plan fed to the VCs.
It would be like coming up with the idea of transplating organs, and then moving on to some other "world altering" dicovery before working out how to keep the new host from rejecting the organ. "I'm not good at the business part" he would say - thats for the business people to work out. BULLSHIT. This guy is a saleman of old technology and snake oil (the cold therapy), he just does a good job of selling it to folks by saying "I don't know the detailed finacial reports, just look at how you'll be BILLIONAIRES if you fund this."
Actually, if the water was collected as part of the air-conditioning cycle, there would be a zero differential effect from todays use of refrigerant cycle coolers. We're already pulling the water out of the air.
Also, in coastal climates, there is usually an abundance of moisture in the air year round.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got a product for you that will revolutionize how you do business. Its called voicemail, and it allows you to send a digitized voice recording to anyone with a compatible receiver. You get notified when one comes in, and you can even speak to the person immediately if they're available. If not your message is saved so that they can listen to it as many times as they like. Even better - this "voicemail" system can even let the caller leave a message for you - letting you know, say, they're on the road all day, and how often you can expect them to chech their messages.
Its amazing...you ought to try it some time!
(On the serious side, I never SMS, partially because of the exhorbitant fees associated vs everything else being included in my basic rate, and partially because I am rarely in a situation where I need to communicate in an environment too noisy for voice communication.)
Until you make a stink about somthing, most of the sheeple wont care. This is about poking The Man to see if he reacts. The current political climate is to try and trump anonymity at every position. Most of the time it doesn't matter, so most people figure that it wont affect them.
The hope is that the government will squash this idea, resulting in some privacy "buzz" in the media. Somehting to counteract the stop-terrorism-by-burning-the-constitution "buzz" which has dominated the discussion so far.
I suppose it depends on where you live. I get fixed rate electricity - about 6c/kWh - 24h/day. I would guess most chargers would pull 100A/240V in order to provide a full charge in a reasonable amount of time .
/.)
Say 40HP avg for 4 hours, about 240 miles, is 120kWh. 120,000Wh / 8H charge time / 80% conversion & storage efficiency = 18,650W. at 240V, that'll be 78A of draw. That's about right - a 100A circuit should do it. Pretty heavy charge needs, if you ask me. (My 1962 house has a 100A main service, BTW, and is typical for homes of that era. Most modern 2500-SF spec homes will come with a single 200A panel.)
For a reality check, the Prius has a 67HP electric "drivetrain" and has a top speed of 105ish MPH. A 40HP average drain on a 65-70mph highway is not unlikely under real-world conditions (I may be off 20 or 30%, but that's always good enough for
Because I can fill up with gas anytime I want in under 5 minutes, just a block and a half from my house.
No, you can't. As a consumer, I want it charged when I plug it in. What if I need to run back out later, but before my scheduled $LEAVE_TIME and there's no charge?
/. - to hack their charger for instant on. Or simply set the next $LEAVE_TIME=$NOW+$CHARGETIME.
How long would it take for folks - especially those here on
Nope, charging is one of the great drawbacks of electric (only) cars.
No, it won't. Dicks.com will be mapped to Dicks.xxx - the transition will be instantaneous and seamless. You don't really think those sites are going to give up their coveted .com net real estate, do you?
No, on the surface this is a big waste of money. In black and white, this will not come to pass. We, as a country, don't have the risk tolerance to go to Mars. There may be funding but it wont be enough and the schedule will slip until they mothball it. We already have $7T in debt and are running a deficit each year which seems to be growing without bound. Nobody is going to find an extra $200B per year for the next decade to properly fund this kind of endeavor. Not even the leader of the majority party. Heck, even W has started to realize that he can't just spend at will.
Quite honestly, I wish we had a kick-ass space program, a better funded national park system, a more proactive (non-petrolium based) energy policy, and a much more isolationist military philosophy. But I'd still rather have a balanced 3-year budget process and a National Debt that is a fraction of the annual budget.
Since the USPTO has lost its focus and direction ;-) (and, perhaps, its backbone)
Thanks for the info. I use FF in a "production" environment, so I won't be trying it just yet, but its good to know that this "feature" is on the horizon. There have been times the going back and printing an invoice page with a discount which was mystriously not included in the final payment invoice has asved me some cash. Not to mention the doing page searches from a slow server...I hate having to wait for the re-post and server-side app to execute again.
(We've come a long way from the early 90s, when you actually had to wait for jpgs to load 'cause the processors could do the DCTs only so fast)
And for a cancer detection firm in Utah, it ahs paid off. They "patented" a gene sequence which tests for the likelihood of breast cancer (I think). Note that they didn't patent the test process, but the information in the gene. Now, no matter what process you use to determine the condition of the gene, you cannot use it for cancer detection wihtout paying a $10k fee to that company. They "own" the exclusive right to the "data". Sort of like patenting moon-dogs as a predictor of coming precipitation, or the presence of a high pressure as a predicter of clear weather. They're natural facts, observable by anyone with the proper instuments. But they're patentable now. (iirc, Canada got into trouble over the cancer detection thing).
**note: this is all from memory of a (single?) online news story quite some time ago, the facts may be significantly different that I have implied**
Lets face it - Patent holders, as technical intellectual property creators, have been falling behind the protections afforded to their artistic bretheren! Copyright holders now have an entire century to reap the benfits, adn for their offspring to reap the benefits, of their labors. It seems wholely unfair to limit patents to such short terms as 14 years (20 for non-design).
I believe patents should be perpetual. Once you create it it should be your forever! And you children and your childrens children. We have seen my the slow - nay, slowing pace (based on patents per dollar spent on healthcare)- of patent applications and inventions in the 20th century that patent protection does not provide the needed impetus for our truly creative technical experts to advance the sciences.
There are numerous cases of inventors who could have changed the world, but insted of licencing their technology, compaies just waited until the patents ran out, and the used those iventions with no compensation to the creative mind whatsoever.
This must stop. We all must rise up and demand perpetual patents now.
(aren't you glad there isn't a _really_ organized lobby for patent holders like there is for performance artists?)
Wow, 240 days sucks. No wonder the Japanese are workaholics. Even in the US, where long work weeks and low vacation leave are the norm, no full time, skilled worker would consider a job with less than 20 days off in a year (usu 8-10 "holidays", with 10 being the gov't norm, 10 days of paid vacation, and 5-10 days of sick leave. Most workers with more than 10-12 years will get an extra week or two on top of those numbers).
Well, at least one of his charater portrayals - from Parenthood:
"Ya know, you need a license to buy a dog, or drive a car. Hell, you need a license to catch a fish, but they'll let any butt-reaming asshole have a kid"
It's amazing how many parents are completely unprepared for the responsibility of raising a child. I thought that maybe I just had a good kid, and the other parents had "normal" kids that wouldn't listen. Until I went to a family reunion a few weeks ago. Most of my cousins have kids ranging from 2 to 13 years old. I happen to know that (with one exception) they are very active in their kids lives, and don't put up with slacking/rudeness. I don't think I've ever seen such a well behaved group. Oh, sure, there were moments, but on the whole they were careful to include the little kids in their games, played nicely with one another, had a good time, and actually _listened_ when their parents - or any parent - asked them to do something. I went from thinking that we just had a "good" kid, to realizing that there are just a lot of lousy parents out there.
Darned, I was hoping they were implementing the Opera back/forward action, where the page is simply redrawn, for lack of the proper term, as the page you saw, rather than re-executed or re-downloaded. In Opera, the page redraws were so fast as to be unnoticable, and there were no data-post limitations. It was a snapshot rather than a reload. Of course, if you wanted to, you could just reload the page manually to re-invoke the post (or whatever actually happened on the page)
Yeah, I read that too. There's no "burning of a CD" as is Compact Disc Digital Audio. It's simply burning a WMA disc. Why bother? Most CD players won't read WMA. I'm pretty sure that even my 2 year old Sony (MP3) changer in my car won't read it, much less my in-dash player. This seems to be protecting content from a diminishingly small market segment.
What's even sillier is that the "kids" (aka Playground Pirates) who they appear to eb targeting are generally smart enough to get around just about anything. They have no money, but gobs of free time.
Now, if this is meant to prevent the over-40 set from swapping discs with their grey-templed friends in thier "new-fangled" Crutchfield toy, then they're on to something. Of course, most oflks that old still like the cover art and physical presence of the original media, so I don't think there;s much call for copies. Especially when you're taking about folks who usually make near or in the 6 figures.
Sounds like a solution looking for a problem.
Oddly enough, they do fly themselves. It's the take-off and landing where they can't do without the humans.
Although I fly fairly rarely, if faced with a long screeners line and an empty portal with a fellow taking $5 bills to just walk right on, I'd find my wallet pretty fast. Especiallly since, in "my" plane, there'd be trained marshalls, just in case.
I know that not everyone would agree with me, but we're already paying a tax to cover the TSA screeners. Why not just roll that over. One of the advantages is that "everyone" pays the bill, so its not like certain airlines would be at a disadvantage. Air Traffic passenger volumnes are back to pre-9-11 levels, so the higher prices due to taxes and fuel surcharges (hidden, but there) are not preventing folks from flying.
I mean, that's what they've been telling us. Its not the casual one-on-one that's cutting into sales, but the semi-anonymous sharing of files over p2p networks that is costing them so much revenue.
If you could convice Michael Dell that he could sell twenty or thirty thousand, you might get him to box up a Precision M70 for you. I've got one right now, and its my main CAD station - 1.86GHz PM / 100GB drive / 2G DDR2 / 256MB nVidia QuadroFX 1400. Its on ly drawbacks are: no dedicated memory card slots and no DVI on the lappy itself (it's on the port rep, but I use the built in monitor at 1920x1200). I would think they could easily squeeze the innards into a mac-mini sized box.
What date identifier does it get? Photo taken, mp3 ripped? Moved on system? Touched? What about bad identifiers? Heck I think I've got a mess of MP3s that are only identified by their rip date and filename, cause the cddb didn't get the info correct.
I was thinking more along the lines of "nothing to see...move along"
On the contrary, it is the opposite of a placebo. It is meant to keep you fearful. Fearful people are more easily led...in whichever direction you inform them is "safe."
Sheep, I tell you. We are surrouded by sheep. And when the heard moves, you move too, or you get trampled. Sometimes I wonder if it was even wise for me to bring a child into this world.
Do you have aby idea what pilots make? Adding a pair of security gaurds, even well paid ones, would add a relatively small amount of cost. Figure $65k for a four day work week and two flights a day (avg 3h ea), that's only $500* a flight - about $2.50 per paying seat on anything larger than a commuter (which probably would be exempt).
*4 day week allows for the elimintation of specified "holidays", essentally reducing the labor burden. The number cited includes 40% labor burden plus 10% O&P.
Heck, if she'd posted this to /. in the first place, we could have taken down Yahoo all by ourselves.
Craven is a visionary, he just comes up with the brilliant ideas and lets the "business" people sort out the details. People like Craven bug me because they never finish what they start, and are never around when the "hard" science has to be reconciled with the business plan fed to the VCs.
It would be like coming up with the idea of transplating organs, and then moving on to some other "world altering" dicovery before working out how to keep the new host from rejecting the organ. "I'm not good at the business part" he would say - thats for the business people to work out. BULLSHIT. This guy is a saleman of old technology and snake oil (the cold therapy), he just does a good job of selling it to folks by saying "I don't know the detailed finacial reports, just look at how you'll be BILLIONAIRES if you fund this."
*shakes head*
Actually, if the water was collected as part of the air-conditioning cycle, there would be a zero differential effect from todays use of refrigerant cycle coolers. We're already pulling the water out of the air.
Also, in coastal climates, there is usually an abundance of moisture in the air year round.