You didn't get a bill for the war. Its not even the check you had to send in on the 15th.
No, Uncle Dubya put it on the credit card. When he hit his spending limit, the congress just raised the limit so he could keep on spending. Luckily for us, interest rates are low, so our payment has been going down even though we've been racking up the charges (kind of like housing).
Every citizen in the US has about $100/month share of the "minimum monthly payment", and at that rate, the card will never be paid off. The balance due comes to just about $20,000 per citizen, and growing.
As an added bonus, one of the biggest creditors is (wait fot it) Social Security! Yes, all that surplus that will keep it solvent through 20xx is in congressional IOUs. How will we pay that back. Higher taxes, of course!
Actually, part of the problem is poop. Animal poop, to be exact, from all the arroyos which channel stormwater to the ocean. You get huge septic plumes after each good rain. Luckily, that only happens in January and February, and only about once a week during those months.
But the cold water isn't free. You have to lift it 3000 feet from the sea bed. It will not take take mgh (mass*gravity*height) to get your "free" cold water to the surface, because it is under pressure, but you will have pumping losses, the cost of a mile long pipe, and the energy requred to get it from the surface to the plant.
Don't forget you'll need to drive that vacuum that's required to change 80 degree liquid water into its vapor phase.
Cooling and evaproative production of drinking water are good applications of this, but energy generation seems like it would be a difficult sell to pay back the generation infrastructure, even if it is net-positive. (BTW - anytime anyone says they are getting net-positive energy, it usually means that they are barely breaking even).
That's the danger of embedded file identifiers: no way to manually search, aka "browse" your system.
Also, to get the right search, you need to create fields. But what if the default fields aren't quite what you want, or you change the fields to something else, then chnge them again later to your "new" needs. Now where do you search? Cna you remember the field, is is spread over two or three field designations? Do you have to update every field (manually or automatically) for every change in storage?
I'd like to have a good searchable filesystem, but I can't yet envision one which would make me give up my heirarchical system. And, yes, I still file my MP3s in folders - because I can find them faster (and I've tried iTunes...it didn't work wel with my collection)
Well, you would test a prototype unit, and a selective sample. It would be silly to run a lifetime test on a unit before it shipped - you'd send them out ready to fail.
Grams is a useful marketing term (though not for anyone on this side of the pond). Since it's fair to assume that every user will have spend most of his or her life on earth, one gram will have a gravitational attraction to the earth with a force equal to one newton. For practical purposes, 1 gram-force = 1 newton. Spring constants are of no use in this case, as you're only intersted in the threshold force (or, in their marketing-speck, equivalent earthbound mass).
I'll agree with you on the last one. If you already touch type effectivly, this will probably slow you down trying to figure out which function key is which, or where the pageup key is.
Re:Virtually Indestructable Keyboard
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I have no idea how you touch type on those things. I can barely type when I'm looking at mine, and the enter and spacebar seem impossible for me to hit correctly.
Interesting. I've hear the opposite: HOA covenants, unless written into the actual deed or adopted as part of local zoning, tend to NOT be upheld in court. This may be the result of most of the cases I'm familiar with being fairly minor (unauthorized but non-offensive paint colors, minor accessory structures, non-HAM antennae).
This falls under the "something has gone wrong and there's nothing we can do about it" category. We all do silly things, even when they don't make a difference.
Heck, I started losing hair about 10 years ago. When I mentioned it to my barber, she recommeneded dropping the heavy-duty shampoo/conditioner for baby shampoo. I did, and I've lost very little hear since. It probably made very little difference, but I use baby shampoo to this day and don't plan on changing.
Heck, if she'd told me to wear my socks inside out, and my hair had stopped fallin out, I'd probably do that, too. When the issue is dear enough, correlation is just as valuable as causality, if it works.
As for EMI/RFI, yes it can be bad. There are few ways it can be bad enough to cause insideous, gradual damage without causing immediate, obvious damage. These folks are, as most people have surmised, nuts.
Plain and simple, this should be used as a prime reason to outlaw all encryption, excpet by authorized government agencies. Oh, and big corporations for protection of IP. Everyday citizens have no reason for encryption.
Outlaw it NOW! The SKY is FALLING! Think of the YOUNGLINGS! (he he, sorry, I couldn't resist);-)
Funny, I found the "can't kill him myself" mentality totally consistent with Obi-wan and Jedi in general. To let him die for his foolish mistake (trying to gain the high ground and failing) is acceptable, but to kill an unarmed (no pun intended) opponent, even a sith, is not acceptable.
Besides, nobody ever kills directly in good cliff-hangers. Since when is Bond summarily executed by a bullet to the temple or base of his skull? Batman? Superman? Of course not...it has to be some slow, non-contact death which requires time (for escape).
No, not really. I've always though of them as force and heat in one - sort of a scifi cylindrical force field surrounded by a plasma. Hot enough to melt stell, and stiff enough to apply force (they do appear to apply physical effort when cutting though steel). In the intance of glass, the force shatters the glass before the heat melts it. *shrug*
Padmes pregnancy is probably the goofyest problem. I can suspend reality and, for two hours, believe in lightsabers, telekentics, sounds of explosions in space, and slower-than-light laser weapons. But to tell me that you can rebuild an entire human from a burned-out torso (I'm talking the medical/technical side, not the "force keeps him alive side") but you don't have any pre-natal care for the freaking princess of an entire world makes no sense whatsoever.
Three Jedi Masters killed by the Sith Lord in a span of thirty seconds also doesn't jive. I don't care how good he is (and he clearly isn't that good, as he is bested by Mace Windu fairly handily) - even a youngling with a lightsaber should have lasted longer. Yeah, I smell legacy there.
Yes, I got the reverse "gift of the magi" plot line there.
I haven't seen it in the theaters yet, so my impression is based totally on the story itself - no pristine sweeping vistas on my laptop.
It falls flat like most movies fall flat - it really needs fifteen or twenty hours to tell such a story, as I'm acustomed to in a book (or, more precisely, a bood on tape/cd). The prequels would have been better served with a brief intro to young ani and the death of his mother, the clone army, and then, starting about 30 mintues in to the first film, we get to the "tranformation" in the third film, but its covered over two and a half films now. The transformation happens almost too fast; the Jedi Masters are too ignorant.
It's a fun film (if you can sit still during the "love" scenes), and I'll see it in a theater when I get the chance - I'm sure it is stunning in a good theater. It can never be on par with IV, because IV was new and different, so that added to the excitment all by itself. The effects were amazing for their time, and were a leap ahead. CG is still just CG - it's just better, smoother, etc. After Jurassic Park, it's not ohmygodWOW to have great CG scenery and characters now. If I can menatlly ignore that stupid timecode for 95% of the movie, I can easily overlook CG that isn't perfect if the story is compelling.
Extra thoughts...Wow, Hayden Christiensen was bad. I'm going to say he was worse than Natalie Portman, but that could just be becuase I'd still like to bed NP. Still, they're both awful. I liked Ewan McGregor more in this film than in the previous ones - he was very good. Yoda had the best and most appropriate facial expressions of any character in the movie. I'm not sure whether to be impressed or depressed by that.
NASA really needs to operate with fewer contractors. Sometimes it is unaviodable, but the ability for scientists, engineers, machinists, and assemblers to work side-by-side - sometimes in the same building - creates amazing efficiencies.
Remove the need to fund programs by committee - Eliminate the current need for a portion in every state, to make sure the funds get spread to each congressman's district. Make the programs funding a 3 to 6 year cycle, to bring some stability to multi-year programs. More effort is wasted in re-prioritizing every year for a new budget then most people realize.
Eliminate the adminitstrative overhead and profit associated with service contracts. NASA will draw the best and brightest by itself, especially if you let them be hands-on rather than contract managers. Yes, this requires a commitment to funding NASA on a fairly continuous basis, and rules out "that big project" the prez wants done before he leaves office - fixed resources, funding, schedules. Scaling up and down every fiver or ten years doesn't help if the contractors loose the good people to other industries - NASA can't just go hire ten thousand crack spacecraft engineers in a month when you need them, why does NASA think that a contractor can do this any more efficiently?
As usual, MB did not test the occurance in many wallets: magnetic stripe vs leather. The mag strip will lose. It will take thousands of cycles. This is easily accomplished by putting your wallet in your back pocket and walking around. Micro-abrasion will occur, and tanning and some leather finshes retain small amounts of solvent which accelerates the process.
I've had cards go bad in less than 9 months.
I got a handful of tyvek sheaths off of ebay and keep may cards in them now. It takes an extra second or two to get the card out (I'm not an old fart yet), and sometimes five or six seconds if I grab the wrong card. This is a fair trade off for my to keep my cards useable for the ever-extending valid period (three years on my most recent one).
Yes, the cost of software is generally out of line with the return for a home user. Business users gain far more for the use of software. Unfortunately, there's no way to distinguish the usage. Worse yet, as a business user, I'm loath to drop a large sum of money on a program unless I know it will work, and will provide a return. 30 day free trials? Sorry, there are times when I get busy and can't even try a program within 30 days...sometimes 180 days wouldn't be long enough to find the time to use it. Some individual packages of software for by business cost more than 4 months salary for the person using it - and another 1 month of salary every year for updates. And I still have to pay to train them to use it.
Heck, a full suite of licenses for a single user might cost as much as their annual salary. Add two to four month of total training time to get them to learn the programs, and I'm looking at a huge cost before I even bill a single penny.
You hit the nail on the head with the documentation. Some of the "popular" programs don't come with anything more than the online help file, prettied up on glossy paper. If I'm goingt o pay $500 (or $5,000) for a software package, I'd damned well better get a three volume set detailing the software - installation file locations, registry keys, system variables, every command, a full tutorial, and examples.
And, yes, I download packages off of usenet. I've had some sit for over a year before I got a chance to try them out and learn them. And, yes, I've bought the retail version once I decided it was in my interest. And, I'm sad to admit, I've "waited" to buy certain programs until they showed a positive return. As soon as I could bill more than the software was worth, I bought it. I like to justify it as saying I'm taking advantage of an unintended 0% extended term financing, with a money back guarantee.
I'm sorry, which national death database, updated daily, were you expecting to use on the first Monday in November, and how were you planning to offer "dead people who aren't really dead" to prove they're still alive and able to vote?
And how would you adjust the vote once you found out who voted? Search the records to determine who they voted for? Must be a new data field in the Diebold boxes.
How about abandoning the SSN problem and get your national voter ID number. Make it illegal to use, request, record, or distribute the number for anything but voting. Require that you bring it to the polling place.
But what happens when the id muber is used twice? Do you cancel both votes (there's a strategy)? Do you only take the first one (another strategy)? Do you correlate the vote with the number, then count them only when the vote is close by tracking down the ID holder and have them certify their vote?
I don't think truly anonymous voting and 100% accuracy are simultaneously possible in a sufficiently large sample set (i.e.: larger than group where everyone is known).
How could you possibly leave out rat fishing. I don't think you really live there.;-)
Now, if you told me you were going 'downeoshun' this weekend, I might believe you.
And, yes, living in VA sucks, but the part I'm in is mighty pretty most of the year, and that partially makes up for the high total tax bill and the lack of any though of consumer protections.
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I though it had a huge fire, too?
I saw it driving through the desert once - very cool looking. The concetrator had the sort of "sun dogs" around it.
Shame it didn't break even. I suspect, though, that like this electricity plant, it had "net positive" power generation.
AFAIK, Ocean engineering is essentially Aeronautical engineering, with water as the fluid medium.
Take a look here
ATTFA, they use a vacuum.
You didn't get a bill for the war. Its not even the check you had to send in on the 15th.
No, Uncle Dubya put it on the credit card. When he hit his spending limit, the congress just raised the limit so he could keep on spending. Luckily for us, interest rates are low, so our payment has been going down even though we've been racking up the charges (kind of like housing).
Every citizen in the US has about $100/month share of the "minimum monthly payment", and at that rate, the card will never be paid off. The balance due comes to just about $20,000 per citizen, and growing.
As an added bonus, one of the biggest creditors is (wait fot it) Social Security! Yes, all that surplus that will keep it solvent through 20xx is in congressional IOUs. How will we pay that back. Higher taxes, of course!
Actually, part of the problem is poop. Animal poop, to be exact, from all the arroyos which channel stormwater to the ocean. You get huge septic plumes after each good rain. Luckily, that only happens in January and February, and only about once a week during those months.
But the cold water isn't free. You have to lift it 3000 feet from the sea bed. It will not take take mgh (mass*gravity*height) to get your "free" cold water to the surface, because it is under pressure, but you will have pumping losses, the cost of a mile long pipe, and the energy requred to get it from the surface to the plant.
Don't forget you'll need to drive that vacuum that's required to change 80 degree liquid water into its vapor phase.
Cooling and evaproative production of drinking water are good applications of this, but energy generation seems like it would be a difficult sell to pay back the generation infrastructure, even if it is net-positive. (BTW - anytime anyone says they are getting net-positive energy, it usually means that they are barely breaking even).
That's the danger of embedded file identifiers: no way to manually search, aka "browse" your system.
Also, to get the right search, you need to create fields. But what if the default fields aren't quite what you want, or you change the fields to something else, then chnge them again later to your "new" needs. Now where do you search? Cna you remember the field, is is spread over two or three field designations? Do you have to update every field (manually or automatically) for every change in storage?
I'd like to have a good searchable filesystem, but I can't yet envision one which would make me give up my heirarchical system. And, yes, I still file my MP3s in folders - because I can find them faster (and I've tried iTunes...it didn't work wel with my collection)
Well, you would test a prototype unit, and a selective sample. It would be silly to run a lifetime test on a unit before it shipped - you'd send them out ready to fail.
Grams is a useful marketing term (though not for anyone on this side of the pond). Since it's fair to assume that every user will have spend most of his or her life on earth, one gram will have a gravitational attraction to the earth with a force equal to one newton. For practical purposes, 1 gram-force = 1 newton. Spring constants are of no use in this case, as you're only intersted in the threshold force (or, in their marketing-speck, equivalent earthbound mass).
I'll agree with you on the last one. If you already touch type effectivly, this will probably slow you down trying to figure out which function key is which, or where the pageup key is.
I have no idea how you touch type on those things. I can barely type when I'm looking at mine, and the enter and spacebar seem impossible for me to hit correctly.
Interesting. I've hear the opposite: HOA covenants, unless written into the actual deed or adopted as part of local zoning, tend to NOT be upheld in court. This may be the result of most of the cases I'm familiar with being fairly minor (unauthorized but non-offensive paint colors, minor accessory structures, non-HAM antennae).
This falls under the "something has gone wrong and there's nothing we can do about it" category. We all do silly things, even when they don't make a difference.
Heck, I started losing hair about 10 years ago. When I mentioned it to my barber, she recommeneded dropping the heavy-duty shampoo/conditioner for baby shampoo. I did, and I've lost very little hear since. It probably made very little difference, but I use baby shampoo to this day and don't plan on changing.
Heck, if she'd told me to wear my socks inside out, and my hair had stopped fallin out, I'd probably do that, too. When the issue is dear enough, correlation is just as valuable as causality, if it works.
As for EMI/RFI, yes it can be bad. There are few ways it can be bad enough to cause insideous, gradual damage without causing immediate, obvious damage. These folks are, as most people have surmised, nuts.
Plain and simple, this should be used as a prime reason to outlaw all encryption, excpet by authorized government agencies. Oh, and big corporations for protection of IP. Everyday citizens have no reason for encryption.
;-)
Outlaw it NOW! The SKY is FALLING! Think of the YOUNGLINGS! (he he, sorry, I couldn't resist)
Funny, I found the "can't kill him myself" mentality totally consistent with Obi-wan and Jedi in general. To let him die for his foolish mistake (trying to gain the high ground and failing) is acceptable, but to kill an unarmed (no pun intended) opponent, even a sith, is not acceptable.
Besides, nobody ever kills directly in good cliff-hangers. Since when is Bond summarily executed by a bullet to the temple or base of his skull? Batman? Superman? Of course not...it has to be some slow, non-contact death which requires time (for escape).
No, not really. I've always though of them as force and heat in one - sort of a scifi cylindrical force field surrounded by a plasma. Hot enough to melt stell, and stiff enough to apply force (they do appear to apply physical effort when cutting though steel). In the intance of glass, the force shatters the glass before the heat melts it. *shrug*
Younglings didn't bother me. Really.
Padmes pregnancy is probably the goofyest problem. I can suspend reality and, for two hours, believe in lightsabers, telekentics, sounds of explosions in space, and slower-than-light laser weapons. But to tell me that you can rebuild an entire human from a burned-out torso (I'm talking the medical/technical side, not the "force keeps him alive side") but you don't have any pre-natal care for the freaking princess of an entire world makes no sense whatsoever.
Three Jedi Masters killed by the Sith Lord in a span of thirty seconds also doesn't jive. I don't care how good he is (and he clearly isn't that good, as he is bested by Mace Windu fairly handily) - even a youngling with a lightsaber should have lasted longer. Yeah, I smell legacy there.
Yes, I got the reverse "gift of the magi" plot line there.
I haven't seen it in the theaters yet, so my impression is based totally on the story itself - no pristine sweeping vistas on my laptop.
It falls flat like most movies fall flat - it really needs fifteen or twenty hours to tell such a story, as I'm acustomed to in a book (or, more precisely, a bood on tape/cd). The prequels would have been better served with a brief intro to young ani and the death of his mother, the clone army, and then, starting about 30 mintues in to the first film, we get to the "tranformation" in the third film, but its covered over two and a half films now. The transformation happens almost too fast; the Jedi Masters are too ignorant.
It's a fun film (if you can sit still during the "love" scenes), and I'll see it in a theater when I get the chance - I'm sure it is stunning in a good theater. It can never be on par with IV, because IV was new and different, so that added to the excitment all by itself. The effects were amazing for their time, and were a leap ahead. CG is still just CG - it's just better, smoother, etc. After Jurassic Park, it's not ohmygodWOW to have great CG scenery and characters now. If I can menatlly ignore that stupid timecode for 95% of the movie, I can easily overlook CG that isn't perfect if the story is compelling.
Extra thoughts...Wow, Hayden Christiensen was bad. I'm going to say he was worse than Natalie Portman, but that could just be becuase I'd still like to bed NP. Still, they're both awful. I liked Ewan McGregor more in this film than in the previous ones - he was very good. Yoda had the best and most appropriate facial expressions of any character in the movie. I'm not sure whether to be impressed or depressed by that.
NASA really needs to operate with fewer contractors. Sometimes it is unaviodable, but the ability for scientists, engineers, machinists, and assemblers to work side-by-side - sometimes in the same building - creates amazing efficiencies.
Remove the need to fund programs by committee - Eliminate the current need for a portion in every state, to make sure the funds get spread to each congressman's district. Make the programs funding a 3 to 6 year cycle, to bring some stability to multi-year programs. More effort is wasted in re-prioritizing every year for a new budget then most people realize.
Eliminate the adminitstrative overhead and profit associated with service contracts. NASA will draw the best and brightest by itself, especially if you let them be hands-on rather than contract managers. Yes, this requires a commitment to funding NASA on a fairly continuous basis, and rules out "that big project" the prez wants done before he leaves office - fixed resources, funding, schedules. Scaling up and down every fiver or ten years doesn't help if the contractors loose the good people to other industries - NASA can't just go hire ten thousand crack spacecraft engineers in a month when you need them, why does NASA think that a contractor can do this any more efficiently?
As usual, MB did not test the occurance in many wallets: magnetic stripe vs leather. The mag strip will lose. It will take thousands of cycles. This is easily accomplished by putting your wallet in your back pocket and walking around. Micro-abrasion will occur, and tanning and some leather finshes retain small amounts of solvent which accelerates the process.
I've had cards go bad in less than 9 months.
I got a handful of tyvek sheaths off of ebay and keep may cards in them now. It takes an extra second or two to get the card out (I'm not an old fart yet), and sometimes five or six seconds if I grab the wrong card. This is a fair trade off for my to keep my cards useable for the ever-extending valid period (three years on my most recent one).
Yes, the cost of software is generally out of line with the return for a home user. Business users gain far more for the use of software. Unfortunately, there's no way to distinguish the usage. Worse yet, as a business user, I'm loath to drop a large sum of money on a program unless I know it will work, and will provide a return. 30 day free trials? Sorry, there are times when I get busy and can't even try a program within 30 days...sometimes 180 days wouldn't be long enough to find the time to use it. Some individual packages of software for by business cost more than 4 months salary for the person using it - and another 1 month of salary every year for updates. And I still have to pay to train them to use it.
Heck, a full suite of licenses for a single user might cost as much as their annual salary. Add two to four month of total training time to get them to learn the programs, and I'm looking at a huge cost before I even bill a single penny.
You hit the nail on the head with the documentation. Some of the "popular" programs don't come with anything more than the online help file, prettied up on glossy paper. If I'm goingt o pay $500 (or $5,000) for a software package, I'd damned well better get a three volume set detailing the software - installation file locations, registry keys, system variables, every command, a full tutorial, and examples.
And, yes, I download packages off of usenet. I've had some sit for over a year before I got a chance to try them out and learn them. And, yes, I've bought the retail version once I decided it was in my interest. And, I'm sad to admit, I've "waited" to buy certain programs until they showed a positive return. As soon as I could bill more than the software was worth, I bought it. I like to justify it as saying I'm taking advantage of an unintended 0% extended term financing, with a money back guarantee.
Sorry no mod points today, so I'll just say "me too."
I'm sorry, which national death database, updated daily, were you expecting to use on the first Monday in November, and how were you planning to offer "dead people who aren't really dead" to prove they're still alive and able to vote?
And how would you adjust the vote once you found out who voted? Search the records to determine who they voted for? Must be a new data field in the Diebold boxes.
How about abandoning the SSN problem and get your national voter ID number. Make it illegal to use, request, record, or distribute the number for anything but voting. Require that you bring it to the polling place.
But what happens when the id muber is used twice? Do you cancel both votes (there's a strategy)? Do you only take the first one (another strategy)? Do you correlate the vote with the number, then count them only when the vote is close by tracking down the ID holder and have them certify their vote?
I don't think truly anonymous voting and 100% accuracy are simultaneously possible in a sufficiently large sample set (i.e.: larger than group where everyone is known).
How could you possibly leave out rat fishing. I don't think you really live there. ;-)
Now, if you told me you were going 'downeoshun' this weekend, I might believe you.
And, yes, living in VA sucks, but the part I'm in is mighty pretty most of the year, and that partially makes up for the high total tax bill and the lack of any though of consumer protections.
CSS2 support is scheduled for a coordinated release with Duke Nukem Forever. I though everybody knew that. ;-)
Did you miss the first post (ad) for the stackable FW drive? You can even double-stack-and-raid.
First Post
An extra few bucks over a standard fugly combo enclosure, but it's a hub, too. And, well, it looks just like the mini, so you don't have to hide it.