Ethanol is much more valuable than left over corn/soy...
The missing point is it is also worth more as a portable liquid fuel than Natural Gas. Why burn Ethanol in a stationary plant to produce Ethanol when you can burn cheaper Natural Gas (or other non-liquid fuel such as mill sawdust) and then sell the expensive Ethanol for vehicle use. Even using waste heat (heat recovery) from a generator plant makes more sense than just burning the fuel for the heat.
Sounds a lot like a DDOS attack...in fact, it sounds exactly like a DDOS attack. But aren't they illegal?
Rule #1 Spammers lie Rule #2 see rule #1
If an e-mail has false headers, what makes you think the reply-to or un-suscribe belong to the spammer. A DDOS against a third party (Joe Job) is not the way to shut down a spammer. You may be helping him shut down his legit competition. An obfuscated URL may point to amazon.com for example.
I liked the other aproach of repeatedly reloading the page used to buy the spammer's product. That's a way to have them melt or have the hosting company become less friendly to hosting spam product order websites.
They want you have to the actual CD (with their patented copy protection) because it makes piracy more difficult.
The bad trade off is it makes the game hard to find, load, and run.
What I find amusing is they wanted another dongle. Forget that. What I realy want is software that installs and runs. Other than being called a theif, why won't my game install and run like my GPS map or CD burner software?
Why do you think I bought a PC with a large fast hard drive? So I can keep all my applications in a folder of slow optical disks of course.
Power factor is more of issue for commercial electricity customers, who are billed for non-unity power factor and often install huge banks of capacitors to correct it
Here is a brief rundown and how it helps. In DC Volts times Amps = Watts. In AC Volta times Amps times Power factor = Watts. Volts times Amps minus Watts = VAR's (Volt Amps Reactive) Power Factor is always between 0 and 1.0 and is either inductive or capacitive. 1.0 = no reactive current.
How does reactive power affect the power company? Take for example an air conditioner. It's electric motor has windings that are inductive. The current is not directly in phase with the applied voltage. The current lags. The AC may draw 15 Amps, but on a 120 Volt circuit only consume 1200 Watts. 15 * 120 = 1800 Volt-Amps. 1200 Watts is the power used. 120 Volts * 15 Amps * 0.66667 PF = 1200 Watts. This leaves a component of 600 VAR's or 5 Amps of reactive current and a Power Factor of 0.66667 inductive. Drawing 5 Amps seems like no big deal to an end consumer. However for the power company, it means the transformer has an extra 5 amps as well as it's circuit breaker and wires. All wire has resiance. A current flowing in a wire will turn some of that voltage caused by the current to produce real Watts (heat) in the wire, transformer and circuit breakers. Your 5 Amps of 0 Watts costs the power company money to heat their lines and reduce their capicity.
Now the neat way to fix it. Capacitors don't heat (except for some small losses) Add some capacitors so the capacitive reactance = the inductive reactance on the line. In the above example 5 Amps is needed.
When done, the 5 Amps of capacitive reactance is out of phase with the inductive reactance by 180 degrees (90 degrees to the resitive load) and thus the 600 VAR's (5 Amps Inductive) from the AC is balanced with 600 VAR's (5 Amps Capacitive) from the capacitors. The nice thing is now the AC gets the current for the VAR's from the capacitors, not the power company. Now the AC uses only 10 Amps from the power company, not the 15 it used to. (The AC still draws 15 Amps, but the combined load of the AC and Capacitors is now 10 Amps and still 1200 Watts.) This is why the power company would like you to adjust your VAR's. If the power company tried to adjust it, (sometimes they do) by adding capacitors, then they may be unbalanced the other way (capacitive) when your AC shuts down but the capacitors don't.)
The old argument remains that Hollywood says they will not release movies in that format unless they can't be protected from copying and thus the technology giants bow to them in order to sell their product.
And their product will catch on with the general population just like SACD (Super Audio Compact Disk). Wanna bet the regular DVD's at generaly under $20 each will outsell HD DVD's at $60 a pop by a large margin. High def DVD will simply sell to the same collector who has all 3 SACD's.
I don't have the player or the CD's. Why would DVD with the same restrictions be any different?
My handset had decided to connect to my next door neighbors base
Many phones are more secure than that and will only register while in the cradle. It's time to upgrade your phone. A neighbor may link to your base. Get a more secure base.
The wireless gear should come with maximum security on by default and require multiple prompts to lower the protection level.
Setting it up like most cordless phones would be good. Pushing a button on the phone and base so they accept each other or powering up the base with the phone in the cradle sets up the session. Other handsets from the same manufacture are rejected. Private wireless should set up just as easy. Hit a button on the router. Power up a laptop. Caputre the ID of the laptop and reject connections to anything else not registered. Security out of the box just like a cordless phone is a good model.
It might be sniffed, but nobody is going to make long distance calls from your base with their own handset.
Turns out, a lot of folks take that feedback to the earpiece as an indication that the phone is actually working.
That is exactly why the local DJ at the radio station uses a commercial Hybrid with a deep null to prevent feedback and a telephone calls their hybrid a sidetone coil. It provides the audiable feedback users expect from a telephone so they know it's working.
You have a little bit of crosstalk between speaker and microphone (you hear yourself talking) but this is normal in telephony and it can be decreased with the volume control setting of your microphone (make sure you turn off the mic. boost).
For those who know about impedance, and how a sidetone coil works, it would be easy to finish the project and cure hearing yourself loudly. It is possible to match a phone with a proper hybrid and have very little crossover of the mike and earphone on a single pair of wires.
There are plans on the internet for op-amp as well as transformer telephone hybrids that do an excelent job of seperation. Properly adding series resistance from the sound card to provide proper source impedance helps a lot. A telephone hybrid works good if the sound source is near 200 ohms, not the less than 20 ohms of a sound card output.
He has about 100 common phrases done up as very cheap logos
If you consider word art logos.
I'm tempted to put up a web site selling tree houses.
Wait for a packet.
Tell him to C & D.
Selling an apple in the supermarket and calling it an apple isn't diluting Apple computer's trademark. Selling tree houses and calling them tree houses also isn't dilluting his trademark. Selling windows in a home improvement store isn't infringing on any of Microsoft's trademarks.
I've NEVER seen an unreasonable speed limit anywhere in my travels.
Visit Oregon sometime. They just passed a law. Some School zones are 20 MPH 24hours a day, 7 days a week, all year. Driving a 35 zone and passing a school is ticket city at 2 AM Saturday morning. Why don't they just close the schools on weekends and send the kids home?
Some have gone so far as to tell you it's illegal to loan the movie to someone else.
As a trade, many of them are marked right on the package they are all region. Nice! Most haven't paid the Macrovision tax so it's free of that pain also. I buy some just to support the idea that region free sells.
For those old enough to remember, that bought a double feature with an intermission and a short. Pixar is getting back into provideing a short. There were a couple previews and the ads that ran in the intermission was for the snack bar.
So that $1.50 movie in the 60s is about the same cost as it is now, after adjusting for inflation.
Now you get a single feature and a lot of advertisements instead of a double feature with a short and intermission.
GPS is needed and useful when you're NOT in the city, when you're out in the middle of nowhere or on a highway getting lost. Cities are the one place a positioning system is useless, so why develop it there?
Want to bet? I use mine most in the city. On my commute of about 30 miles, I hit the backup due to the sideways semi. I take the next exit whatever it it. I let the in car nav (GPS based) route me through the housing complex to get back on past the blockage.
Ever notice how many housing developments are designed to not make it easy for someone to enter from one end and find the way out on the other. In car nav fixes that problem and makes it easy to get from one major street to another or pass a blockage and emerge past the stoppage.
A good GPS nav system saves time and gas in the city. In time and gas saved, mine has paid for itself in just city driving.
Did anybody else notice that the article missed the creation of electrical patterns in the PCB?
Yes. I was wondering why they patterned the solder mask before patterning the metal lines. I read on to find out they simply skipped patterning the metal lines.
Solder mask is the coating that covers the entire board except for the pads where the components get soldered. This has to be done after the metal lines are etched. It's hard to etch the traces under the solder mask if it's done first.
A quarterwave broadcasting antenna at 3Ghz is less than an inch. A pin on the socket could send all of the signal away only to be picked up in places by other antennas nearby. Wirewrap is for low frequency only. Wirewrap pins are too long for 100 base T ethernet. The stub will provide crosstalk.
After we finished the film, we were confident that we had done the right thing to abandon the broadcast flag and honestly were considering abandoning television altogether."
The industry wants to kill free over the air broadcast. What better way to do it. Pull quality programming because it might be sent over the internet, or make it unusable and expensive so nobody will bother. The transition from analog to digital simply means the end of over the air free TV.
Ever notice there are lots of HDTV's (with an analog tuner and monitor input)? Notice there are lots of HDTV Monitors? Notice there are lots of TV options to use your computer? Notice the almost complete lack of any tv that can pick up over the air digital broadcast? There is lots of HDTV for cable and satelite just as long as a tuner is not needed.
Simply put, if this passes, my TV just becomes a VCR, DVD, and Playstation monitor. I have no plans to invest in TV. The internet will finish replacing TV.
A replacement TV will have high cost and provide little value.
I don't see how it could possibly curb casual copying, nor why three copies is considered "okay". It's just weird.
What the industry is the most afraid of is perfect copies of a copy. They are trading the make three copies from an original is ok for you can't make copies of your copy of the original. It's the narrow point of the wedge. I'll give you permission to make a few copies from an original, but you can't make copies of a copy in trade.
However, neuron count in specific brain areas would seem to be more significant, and higher densities would provide more neurons/volume and therefore enable a smaller brain to outperform a larger one.
Nice try. Most of the time a high density indicates a problem such as lead or mercury. These heavy metals in the brain are blamed for the brain shorting out, not working better.
No. I would have to say "It just barely works" but I didn't want to appear too harsh. The new version (XP) works a little better, but is far from a fix as it has the new critical exploit of the week that needs patched. Some applications don't work properly on XP. Because of that, XP is not seen as an upgrade or reliable (not more reliable than Win2K)
Where I work, some of the equipment still uses Windows 95 and 98. The equipment stands alone much like a point of sale cash register. If the vendor wants to provide an upgrade at a steep price that is viewed by a business as not needed, then the "it is not broken, don't fix it" reasoning is used. Why spend the money. It works.
Most of the desk workstations where I work do run Win2K It's what came with them and the license is corporate wide. It isn't broken (If you don't count annoyances such as IE and BSOD's as breakage) why fix it. The fix (XP) is not free of the problems the current version has. It just crashes less often. In additon it comes with it's own set of new problems such as applications that won't run properly on it.
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Ethanol is much more valuable than left over corn/soy...
The missing point is it is also worth more as a portable liquid fuel than Natural Gas. Why burn Ethanol in a stationary plant to produce Ethanol when you can burn cheaper Natural Gas (or other non-liquid fuel such as mill sawdust) and then sell the expensive Ethanol for vehicle use. Even using waste heat (heat recovery) from a generator plant makes more sense than just burning the fuel for the heat.
Sounds a lot like a DDOS attack...in fact, it sounds exactly like a DDOS attack. But aren't they illegal?
Rule #1 Spammers lie
Rule #2 see rule #1
If an e-mail has false headers, what makes you think the reply-to or un-suscribe belong to the spammer. A DDOS against a third party (Joe Job) is not the way to shut down a spammer. You may be helping him shut down his legit competition. An obfuscated URL may point to amazon.com for example.
I liked the other aproach of repeatedly reloading the page used to buy the spammer's product. That's a way to have them melt or have the hosting company become less friendly to hosting spam product order websites.
They want you have to the actual CD (with their patented copy protection) because it makes piracy more difficult.
The bad trade off is it makes the game hard to find, load, and run.
What I find amusing is they wanted another dongle. Forget that. What I realy want is software that installs and runs. Other than being called a theif, why won't my game install and run like my GPS map or CD burner software?
Why do you think I bought a PC with a large fast hard drive? So I can keep all my applications in a folder of slow optical disks of course.
Power factor is more of issue for commercial electricity customers, who are billed for non-unity power factor and often install huge banks of capacitors to correct it
Here is a brief rundown and how it helps.
In DC Volts times Amps = Watts.
In AC Volta times Amps times Power factor = Watts.
Volts times Amps minus Watts = VAR's (Volt Amps Reactive) Power Factor is always between 0 and 1.0 and is either inductive or capacitive. 1.0 = no reactive current.
How does reactive power affect the power company?
Take for example an air conditioner. It's electric motor has windings that are inductive. The current is not directly in phase with the applied voltage. The current lags. The AC may draw 15 Amps, but on a 120 Volt circuit only consume 1200 Watts. 15 * 120 = 1800 Volt-Amps. 1200 Watts is the power used. 120 Volts * 15 Amps * 0.66667 PF = 1200 Watts. This leaves a component of 600 VAR's or 5 Amps of reactive current and a Power Factor of 0.66667 inductive. Drawing 5 Amps seems like no big deal to an end consumer. However for the power company, it means the transformer has an extra 5 amps as well as it's circuit breaker and wires. All wire has resiance. A current flowing in a wire will turn some of that voltage caused by the current to produce real Watts (heat) in the wire, transformer and circuit breakers. Your 5 Amps of 0 Watts costs the power company money to heat their lines and reduce their capicity.
Now the neat way to fix it. Capacitors don't heat (except for some small losses) Add some capacitors so the capacitive reactance = the inductive reactance on the line. In the above example 5 Amps is needed.
When done, the 5 Amps of capacitive reactance is out of phase with the inductive reactance by 180 degrees (90 degrees to the resitive load) and thus the 600 VAR's (5 Amps Inductive) from the AC is balanced with 600 VAR's (5 Amps Capacitive) from the capacitors. The nice thing is now the AC gets the current for the VAR's from the capacitors, not the power company. Now the AC uses only 10 Amps from the power company, not the 15 it used to. (The AC still draws 15 Amps, but the combined load of the AC and Capacitors is now 10 Amps and still 1200 Watts.) This is why the power company would like you to adjust your VAR's. If the power company tried to adjust it, (sometimes they do) by adding capacitors, then they may be unbalanced the other way (capacitive) when your AC shuts down but the capacitors don't.)
The old argument remains that Hollywood says they will not release movies in that format unless they can't be protected from copying and thus the technology giants bow to them in order to sell their product.
And their product will catch on with the general population just like SACD (Super Audio Compact Disk). Wanna bet the regular DVD's at generaly under $20 each will outsell HD DVD's at $60 a pop by a large margin. High def DVD will simply sell to the same collector who has all 3 SACD's.
I don't have the player or the CD's.
Why would DVD with the same restrictions be any different?
If you're looking at saving $15 every fill up, many people start to take notice.
That applies to the inkjet printer also. I won't buy another printer without checking the yield and cost of supplies up front.
My handset had decided to connect to my next door neighbors base
Many phones are more secure than that and will only register while in the cradle. It's time to upgrade your phone. A neighbor may link to your base. Get a more secure base.
The wireless gear should come with maximum security on by default and require multiple prompts to lower the protection level.
Setting it up like most cordless phones would be good. Pushing a button on the phone and base so they accept each other or powering up the base with the phone in the cradle sets up the session. Other handsets from the same manufacture are rejected. Private wireless should set up just as easy. Hit a button on the router. Power up a laptop. Caputre the ID of the laptop and reject connections to anything else not registered. Security out of the box just like a cordless phone is a good model.
It might be sniffed, but nobody is going to make long distance calls from your base with their own handset.
Turns out, a lot of folks take that feedback to the earpiece as an indication that the phone is actually working.
That is exactly why the local DJ at the radio station uses a commercial Hybrid with a deep null to prevent feedback and a telephone calls their hybrid a sidetone coil. It provides the audiable feedback users expect from a telephone so they know it's working.
Thanks for the text.
You have a little bit of crosstalk between speaker and microphone (you hear yourself talking) but this is normal in telephony and it can be decreased with the volume control setting of your microphone (make sure you turn off the mic. boost).
For those who know about impedance, and how a sidetone coil works, it would be easy to finish the project and cure hearing yourself loudly. It is possible to match a phone with a proper hybrid and have very little crossover of the mike and earphone on a single pair of wires.
There are plans on the internet for op-amp as well as transformer telephone hybrids that do an excelent job of seperation. Properly adding series resistance from the sound card to provide proper source impedance helps a lot. A telephone hybrid works good if the sound source is near 200 ohms, not the less than 20 ohms of a sound card output.
Other than a green "start" button, what's the difference in terms of *user experience*?
BSOD less often. I seldom see Dr Watson anymore.
He has about 100 common phrases done up as very cheap logos
If you consider word art logos.
I'm tempted to put up a web site selling tree houses.
Wait for a packet.
Tell him to C & D.
Selling an apple in the supermarket and calling it an apple isn't diluting Apple computer's trademark. Selling tree houses and calling them tree houses also isn't dilluting his trademark. Selling windows in a home improvement store isn't infringing on any of Microsoft's trademarks.
I've NEVER seen an unreasonable speed limit anywhere in my travels.
Visit Oregon sometime. They just passed a law. Some School zones are 20 MPH 24hours a day, 7 days a week, all year. Driving a 35 zone and passing a school is ticket city at 2 AM Saturday morning. Why don't they just close the schools on weekends and send the kids home?
Some have gone so far as to tell you it's illegal to loan the movie to someone else.
As a trade, many of them are marked right on the package they are all region. Nice! Most haven't paid the Macrovision tax so it's free of that pain also.
I buy some just to support the idea that region free sells.
For those old enough to remember, that bought a double feature with an intermission and a short. Pixar is getting back into provideing a short. There were a couple previews and the ads that ran in the intermission was for the snack bar.
So that $1.50 movie in the 60s is about the same cost as it is now, after adjusting for inflation.
Now you get a single feature and a lot of advertisements instead of a double feature with a short and intermission.
GPS is needed and useful when you're NOT in the city, when you're out in the middle of nowhere or on a highway getting lost. Cities are the one place a positioning system is useless, so why develop it there?
Want to bet? I use mine most in the city. On my commute of about 30 miles, I hit the backup due to the sideways semi. I take the next exit whatever it it. I let the in car nav (GPS based) route me through the housing complex to get back on past the blockage.
Ever notice how many housing developments are designed to not make it easy for someone to enter from one end and find the way out on the other. In car nav fixes that problem and makes it easy to get from one major street to another or pass a blockage and emerge past the stoppage.
A good GPS nav system saves time and gas in the city. In time and gas saved, mine has paid for itself in just city driving.
Or, are any of my friends within 6 blocks of me?
They only way a free AP sponsor would be interested if any of your friends are within 6 blocks would be to suggest you all meet at Starbucks.
Did anybody else notice that the article missed the creation of electrical patterns in the PCB?
Yes. I was wondering why they patterned the solder mask before patterning the metal lines. I read on to find out they simply skipped patterning the metal lines.
Solder mask is the coating that covers the entire board except for the pads where the components get soldered. This has to be done after the metal lines are etched. It's hard to etch the traces under the solder mask if it's done first.
Wirewrap will be flaky at high frequencies,
A quarterwave broadcasting antenna at 3Ghz is less than an inch. A pin on the socket could send all of the signal away only to be picked up in places by other antennas nearby. Wirewrap is for low frequency only. Wirewrap pins are too long for 100 base T ethernet. The stub will provide crosstalk.
After we finished the film, we were confident that we had done the right thing to abandon the broadcast flag and honestly were considering abandoning television altogether."
The industry wants to kill free over the air broadcast. What better way to do it. Pull quality programming because it might be sent over the internet, or make it unusable and expensive so nobody will bother. The transition from analog to digital simply means the end of over the air free TV.
Ever notice there are lots of HDTV's (with an analog tuner and monitor input)?
Notice there are lots of HDTV Monitors?
Notice there are lots of TV options to use your computer?
Notice the almost complete lack of any tv that can pick up over the air digital broadcast?
There is lots of HDTV for cable and satelite just as long as a tuner is not needed.
Simply put, if this passes, my TV just becomes a VCR, DVD, and Playstation monitor. I have no plans to invest in TV. The internet will finish replacing TV.
A replacement TV will have high cost and provide little value.
Anyone miss Lithography ... or cave painting?
If you want Lithography, work in a wafer plant. If you want cave painting, leave finger paints out where an unsupervised small child can reach it.
I don't see how it could possibly curb casual copying, nor why three copies is considered "okay". It's just weird.
What the industry is the most afraid of is perfect copies of a copy. They are trading the make three copies from an original is ok for you can't make copies of your copy of the original. It's the narrow point of the wedge. I'll give you permission to make a few copies from an original, but you can't make copies of a copy in trade.
However, neuron count in specific brain areas would seem to be more significant, and higher densities would provide more neurons/volume and therefore enable a smaller brain to outperform a larger one.
Nice try. Most of the time a high density indicates a problem such as lead or mercury. These heavy metals in the brain are blamed for the brain shorting out, not working better.
Don't you mean "It Just Works"?
No. I would have to say "It just barely works" but I didn't want to appear too harsh. The new version (XP) works a little better, but is far from a fix as it has the new critical exploit of the week that needs patched. Some applications don't work properly on XP. Because of that, XP is not seen as an upgrade or reliable (not more reliable than Win2K)
Where I work, some of the equipment still uses Windows 95 and 98. The equipment stands alone much like a point of sale cash register. If the vendor wants to provide an upgrade at a steep price that is viewed by a business as not needed, then the "it is not broken, don't fix it" reasoning is used. Why spend the money. It works.
Most of the desk workstations where I work do run Win2K It's what came with them and the license is corporate wide. It isn't broken (If you don't count annoyances such as IE and BSOD's as breakage) why fix it. The fix (XP) is not free of the problems the current version has. It just crashes less often. In additon it comes with it's own set of new problems such as applications that won't run properly on it.