The company could not produce a product that the consumers could afford. The initial cost of going solar is too expensive for most consumers. A typical home uses about 30 KWH/Day. At $1.00/Watt minimum for solar panels + installation + inverters/grid tie + permits + utility contracts + ???, it is just simpler and cheaper to buy power at under 10 cents/KWH in many parts of the US.
A solar installation is not portable. When I move, it must be left behind or new expense of Permits, Installation, etc must be repeated.
My big cut in energy cost was simply moving into a well insulated home. It is larger than our old house and the energy cost is about 1/3rd.
There is some demand for solar. In arid areas with lots of daylight, a smaller installation will do fine. For me in the great Pacific North Wet, my cost for the same power will be about double than someone in Phoenix. Electric is 7.98 cents/KWH. Until electric rates are cost prohibitive, the hight cost alternatives will wait.
Due to the lack of consumer demand, the manufactures can not find enough volume at the required high retail prices to pay back their loans, and operate the factory at a profit.
When your operating expenses are 120 million and your gross income is under 60 million, you can see a huge shift in the market is required to break even. That market is not here yet.
If they are hard handed about it, the more the alternatives become attractive. A good example of this is the Ernie Ball BSA reaction. This publicity has had a ripple effect. It is the biggest reason I have gone open source at home. http://news.cnet.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html
The US government is running the exact same ponzi scheme. With a good credit rating and increasing debt attracting investors in unsustainable deficit spending, Standard and Poor called it in the last negotiations to raise the limit. It is a risky investment even though the past payment record has been perfect. Obama has declared the rating invalid. This is like Enron declaring a downgrade invalid.
I dissagree. Both in the same market trying to subscribe the same customers is doing the job.
I started with Dial Up. Upgraded to Comcast about 4 years ago. 2 Meg down connection.
I dropped Comcast and got Qwest with a lower price and a 6 meg down connection.
This week Comcast had a door to door salesman stop by. They just pulled fiber and are offering 20 Meg down for about $5 less. This does not happen in a monopoly market.
Only open for one class and one quarter makes this look like a publicity stunt.. Lots of free advertising for Stanford. For some real online free classes, look into Kahn. http://www.khanacademy.org/
On the flip side I switched from Comcast to Qwest. I pay almost $20 less per month because I didn't have the triple play so the ISP only service was spendy. Moving to Qwest gave me the discount of having the landline. When on Comcast, Hulu, Youtube, Netflix, etc were throttled so there was lots of Buffering, Buffering, Buffering. I figured this was to encourage purchase of the triple play. The bit torrent throttling was icing on the cake. After the move to Qwest, Netflix works without buffering, Google Voice and an Analog Telephone Adapter for a SIP phone work fine. I found Quest was not filtering the ports used for VOIP or video conferencing. The switch moved me from under 2 meg DL speeds to just under 6 Meg with no noticeable filtering of ports. Not bad for a price reduction.
I have not had much trouble with the DNS until just this last month. The issues with DNS appear to impact several ISP's.
Many new words are added to the language by common use. If I want to look something up I often Google it. This verb is a recent example of this. Turning something into a game is another new word in developement.
This same solution is used at large venues for the wireless microphones. A coax is run along the sound board snake and an antenna is placed on stage just for the wireless mics. The coax is fed into a TV distribution amplifier (times to for diversity systems) and distributed to the wireless receivers. This places the mics and antennas for the receivers in close proximity and eliminates interferance from the many other presenters in adjacent rooms with their wireless mics. The whole concept is to get a usable signal to noise ratio in a noisy environment.
Copper as a reflector will create multipath problems. It is best to use something designed to absorb the radiation to attenuate it. Visit the microwave cookware booth nearby and offer to display all their browning dishes on your backdrop. This will convert the signal to heat and attenuate it. This works for signals entering your area as well as your spill out to your neighbors. You will want a lot of dishes to fully tile your wall.
Send them a letter explaining the violation of the software license and mention that they need to audit the software prior to the pending Business Software Alliance audit. If they are violating your code, whose else are they violating?
Needed to retrieve some family letters and records from a deceased relative's backup on 3.5 inch floppies. Rebuilt a Windows 3.1 machine and restored the DOS backups to recover the files. The PFS First Choice files could not export the files into anything that would preserve the formatting in something more modern. A Google search provided the answer. Import the documents into Star Office and export them as MS Word 97 files. This was done on a Windows 98 machine. Sometimes it pays to keep old software for emergencies. Real Men keep backups.
By the same token, I use IE 6 at work as part of the corporate build, Firefox for browsing external sites, Chrome on a netbook, Opera mini on my phone, By your logic adding scores for different versions, I should be a Mensa club member. I use all of them regularly. I only use IE for the corporate environment as it is the IT build. There are plans to migrate off that soon as the corporate applications are upgraded. They are skipping Vista entirely in the upgrade. That has been a good call.
The cost of transistors has continued to fall as higher power devices can be had at much lower cost. The engineering department in an effort to cut costs (including Shipping weight) by using smaller filter caps, switch mode power supplies (the typical PC sound card background noise) and non standard power measurements to inflate the Watts number while providing a much smaller amp.
Which is better? A 1,000 watt 5.1 surround system or a stereo amp with 250 Watts per channel into 8 ohms with no more than 0.005% THD. In reality the second amp has much more headroom, specified THD values that are uncommon nowdays, and much more power.
By the way, I'm the guy with the 30 year old stereo.. Bought mine in 1981.
Often overlooked in a stereo is the speaker quality. The cabinet should be silent. First test of any speaker is to leave it off and knock on the back. Does it sound like a wooden shipping crate? If so, leave that one. The drivers will thump on the cabinet for you. Most big box speakers are made with the minimum size voice coil, magnet, and box thickness for shipping weight. Most of the big box stereo systems weigh less then one of my speakers. I just looked up the speck on my speakers. They are 68 Lbs each.
The light weight stuff simply does not match the fidelity or accuracy of the good stuff.
I agree, the net is good, but those who don't do the math will only see the large area of darker collectors as an area of soler heat collection and global warming. They don't take into consideration the alternative it is replacing. If you did paint the Sahara black, it would make a considerable temperature raise in the desert. This is the only thing they will point to.
I wonder when the climate change people will climb all over this for all the new land area converted from lighter colors that reflect light back into space into large areas of dark colors for the express purpose of converting more of the sun's energy to heat?
In one place there is a proposal to paint all the rooftops white to reduce global warming and in the next breath is to put up a bunch of dark color collectors to maximize the intake of energy (heat) for use.
Please don't avoid the issue by playing the Race Card. That is a cheap shot and totally avoids the issue.
Here is the issue. Has your income Doubled in the Last 5 years? Seriously, has it? Have your investments also doubled in value in the last 5 years?
Race card aside, take a look at the rate your Uncle Sam is blowing through money. They DOUBLED spending in the last 5 years. They didn't double income to pay for it. Fair share time. Double everyone's taxes and fees. Now instead of seeing about 1/2 my income vanish to taxes and fees, I would see almost all if it vanish. When it vanishes, what incentive do I have to keep working a producing. Doubling my taxes will not Double Revenue no matter how hard you seize my assets. You can take my assets only once while I am not working. After that I become a ward of the state.
The Al Gore global warming hockey stick is not the temperature rise, but the debt rise. http://zfacts.com/p/1195.html Add the limit they are trying to add to this graph.
Care to play the class envy card or race card again and avoid the real issue of runaway spending and the upcoming hyperinflation. Playing class envy and the race card won't save us. Putting a cap on spending will, which is what the debt limit is.. a cap.
Often the runaway rate of borrowing is not understood by the public. As we add deficit spending to our debt the total debt quickly becomes a larger part of our GDP. As the debt spirals past the 100% of the GDP, the interest payments on the debt takes a huge portion of our GDP. This is followed by borrowing (or printing money) to keep up on the growing payments. As the dollar becomes devalued, it devalues at a faster rate as more money is borrowed or printed to pay it. Even more is borrowed to keep pace with baseline budgets for entitlement programs. This leads to over-taxation of the few working, investing, or saving. To prevent paying high service costs the interest rate is held artificially low while inflation raises prices. This puts banks in the red (guaranteed by the government) as the money devalues and the loan payments become trivial to the banks due to fixed rate loans. Non fixed rate loans such as credit cards will see a huge pressure for higher rates and fees. Low interest rate cards with no or low fees are going away rapidly.
Next this cycle spirals into hyperinflation.. Unless we cap our spending and balance the budget. Raising the cap faster than GDP growth is a fast track into devalued money, hyper-inflation, loss of jobs, poverty, and government collapse.
If we left the cap in place, and spent no more money than we take in, (balanced budget) the SPENDING level will be the same as it was only 5 years ago. This is the real story. we don't have a debt crisis, we have a spending crisis. Are you spending double what you were 5 years ago? If not then why? Why is it OK for the Government to spend recklessly?
Look up the Wikipedia article on Hyperinflation. Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.
If you call overseas often, one of the SIP phones is a good deal. For less than $15 (20 with taxes and E911 charge) unlimited calls to all of US and Canada in a base package or including ~35 other countries is possible. In plan is free regardless of destination. SIP to SIP is free like Skype to Skype. If you are really cheap, pick up a free SIP account from one of the free SIP account providers such as SIPgate, IPPI, IPTel, then pick up a free inward phone number from IPKall. This is $60 a year cheaper then Skype with a Skype-in number at $60 per year or $20/quarter. WIth an unlocked SIP analog phone adaptor, it will ring a POTS phone on your desk. No computer needs left on. Several of the free SIP providers include free voicemail as part of the package.
With a IPKall number, you can send your Google Voice number to it to ring your free phone and not use any cell minutes.
Unfortunately many of the recycled IPKall numbers were used to create overseas Google Voice accounts so they can't be used to forward your Google Voice as it is "Already Registered to two Google Voice Accounts". Keep trying until you get a number not already used. I'm hoping GV will be able to kick off the invalid users by requiring them to re-authenticate their number. This will free up the throw away numbers for the current owner to use.
I have a few options depending on how far back I want to go. If I want to go pre-transistor, I can fire up my Grandfather's portable radio. It is 5 tube and uses 3 batteries. It uses a 1.5 volt filament battery, a 9 volt bias battery, and a 45 volt B battery. I can't find the B battery any more but a few 9 volt batteries will do the job.
More recently I needed to recover some family history documents for a family member. They were properly backed up on 3.5 inch floppies. This required installing DOS 3.21 to do the restore, running Windows 3.1 to run PFS First Choice to open the documents (found them), then installing my old copy of Star Office which could then import the documents and keep the formatting, then save them in MS Word format. This enabled opening them on a more modern word processor. Since Windows 3.1 does not support USB or Networking, I had to save the result on 3.5 inch floppies, then load them into an old Windows 95 machine (again no USB support) to save them to a network drive.
Listening to the Data Guardian program make it's unique noise on the DOS/Windows machine was a true nostalgia hit. I should record the sound and save it as a ringtone.
When I lived overseas in a small country, the Internet was dialup at 25 cents US per minute. Needless to say that was basically no Internet. A home server was a must for our local content and we networked our printer for the family.
Here in the US, the benefit far outweighs the downside. The point is to make it save you money so it pretty much pays for itself. In this I include Netflix at under $10 a month as a replacement for a couple of DVD's rented per week at about $5 each (dated info. Redbox killed the rental store). I have dropped all magazine and newspaper subscriptions.
I have a SIP phone. With the purchase of a two line ATA, and the removal of long distance on the home phone, the paid plan allows unlimited calling all of the US and Canada for under $20/month + included minutes to 35 other countries. Unfortunately one country is not included, so the second line is set up to a SIP address. SIP to SIP is free anywhere worldwide. With a phone adapter calls simply ring a real phone. no computer needs to be on. Unlike Skype with a skype in number at $60/year or $20/quarter, the free SIP account includes a free inward number in the US and an iNum. It does not take too many benefits to justify a broadband connection at home. Put it to work and make it work for you. Don't waste your time on Facebook, farmville, WOW, and porn. There is more to the Internet than just Port 80.
Getting free updates and access to the Ubuntu Software Center is gravy on the cake.
Instead of PayPal.. I think the mobile phone payment system may get some traction. Even vending machines at work have that option now.
If you are one to give any credence to biblical prophecies, the chip in the cell phone will be moved where it can't be lost of stolen. It will be placed in the hand or forehead. After cash no longer exists, nobody will be able to buy or sell without the ID. It will be referred to as the mark of the beast. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/22/tech/main631231.shtml Vending machines at work and the ticket booth at the local cinema has this up and running now. It is NOT Paypal. Paypal will be toast unless they change.
You might want to invest a little bit more to get reliable connections on the end and an impedence somewhere in the ball park.
They are to be 4 twisted pairs, each pair shielded.
Every manufacturer's HDMI cable is built to meet a nominal 100 ohm characteristic impedance, The best one can do is to hold impedance within a range, centered on 100 ohms; the official HDMI spec calls for 100 ohms plus or minus 15%, which for a coax would be horribly sloppy. The tighter that tolerance can be kept, the better the performance will be.
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The company could not produce a product that the consumers could afford. The initial cost of going solar is too expensive for most consumers. A typical home uses about 30 KWH/Day. At $1.00/Watt minimum for solar panels + installation + inverters/grid tie + permits + utility contracts + ???, it is just simpler and cheaper to buy power at under 10 cents/KWH in many parts of the US.
A solar installation is not portable. When I move, it must be left behind or new expense of Permits, Installation, etc must be repeated.
My big cut in energy cost was simply moving into a well insulated home. It is larger than our old house and the energy cost is about 1/3rd.
There is some demand for solar. In arid areas with lots of daylight, a smaller installation will do fine. For me in the great Pacific North Wet, my cost for the same power will be about double than someone in Phoenix. Electric is 7.98 cents/KWH. Until electric rates are cost prohibitive, the hight cost alternatives will wait.
Due to the lack of consumer demand, the manufactures can not find enough volume at the required high retail prices to pay back their loans, and operate the factory at a profit.
When your operating expenses are 120 million and your gross income is under 60 million, you can see a huge shift in the market is required to break even. That market is not here yet.
Probably was stolen without the charger. It became non functional due to a low battery. Fixed may be AC adapter purchased.
If they are hard handed about it, the more the alternatives become attractive. A good example of this is the Ernie Ball BSA reaction. This publicity has had a ripple effect. It is the biggest reason I have gone open source at home.
http://news.cnet.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html
The US government is running the exact same ponzi scheme. With a good credit rating and increasing debt attracting investors in unsustainable deficit spending, Standard and Poor called it in the last negotiations to raise the limit. It is a risky investment even though the past payment record has been perfect. Obama has declared the rating invalid. This is like Enron declaring a downgrade invalid.
I dissagree. Both in the same market trying to subscribe the same customers is doing the job.
I started with Dial Up. Upgraded to Comcast about 4 years ago. 2 Meg down connection.
I dropped Comcast and got Qwest with a lower price and a 6 meg down connection.
This week Comcast had a door to door salesman stop by. They just pulled fiber and are offering 20 Meg down for about $5 less. This does not happen in a monopoly market.
Only open for one class and one quarter makes this look like a publicity stunt.. Lots of free advertising for Stanford. For some real online free classes, look into Kahn. http://www.khanacademy.org/
On the flip side I switched from Comcast to Qwest. I pay almost $20 less per month because I didn't have the triple play so the ISP only service was spendy. Moving to Qwest gave me the discount of having the landline. When on Comcast, Hulu, Youtube, Netflix, etc were throttled so there was lots of Buffering, Buffering, Buffering. I figured this was to encourage purchase of the triple play. The bit torrent throttling was icing on the cake. After the move to Qwest, Netflix works without buffering, Google Voice and an Analog Telephone Adapter for a SIP phone work fine. I found Quest was not filtering the ports used for VOIP or video conferencing. The switch moved me from under 2 meg DL speeds to just under 6 Meg with no noticeable filtering of ports. Not bad for a price reduction.
I have not had much trouble with the DNS until just this last month. The issues with DNS appear to impact several ISP's.
Many new words are added to the language by common use. If I want to look something up I often Google it. This verb is a recent example of this. Turning something into a game is another new word in developement.
This same solution is used at large venues for the wireless microphones. A coax is run along the sound board snake and an antenna is placed on stage just for the wireless mics. The coax is fed into a TV distribution amplifier (times to for diversity systems) and distributed to the wireless receivers. This places the mics and antennas for the receivers in close proximity and eliminates interferance from the many other presenters in adjacent rooms with their wireless mics. The whole concept is to get a usable signal to noise ratio in a noisy environment.
Copper as a reflector will create multipath problems. It is best to use something designed to absorb the radiation to attenuate it. Visit the microwave cookware booth nearby and offer to display all their browning dishes on your backdrop. This will convert the signal to heat and attenuate it. This works for signals entering your area as well as your spill out to your neighbors. You will want a lot of dishes to fully tile your wall.
Send them a letter explaining the violation of the software license and mention that they need to audit the software prior to the pending Business Software Alliance audit. If they are violating your code, whose else are they violating?
The key here is it was NOT my backup that needed recovered. Having a backup of the old software was the key to converting it and keeping the format.
Saving as an ASCII text file was an option and is still an option with MS Word. We should do this for future generations.
True story.. This year I used DOS Backup.
Needed to retrieve some family letters and records from a deceased relative's backup on 3.5 inch floppies. Rebuilt a Windows 3.1 machine and restored the DOS backups to recover the files. The PFS First Choice files could not export the files into anything that would preserve the formatting in something more modern. A Google search provided the answer. Import the documents into Star Office and export them as MS Word 97 files. This was done on a Windows 98 machine. Sometimes it pays to keep old software for emergencies. Real Men keep backups.
By the same token, I use IE 6 at work as part of the corporate build, Firefox for browsing external sites, Chrome on a netbook, Opera mini on my phone, By your logic adding scores for different versions, I should be a Mensa club member. I use all of them regularly. I only use IE for the corporate environment as it is the IT build. There are plans to migrate off that soon as the corporate applications are upgraded. They are skipping Vista entirely in the upgrade. That has been a good call.
The cost of transistors has continued to fall as higher power devices can be had at much lower cost. The engineering department in an effort to cut costs (including Shipping weight) by using smaller filter caps, switch mode power supplies (the typical PC sound card background noise) and non standard power measurements to inflate the Watts number while providing a much smaller amp.
Which is better? A 1,000 watt 5.1 surround system or a stereo amp with 250 Watts per channel into 8 ohms with no more than 0.005% THD. In reality the second amp has much more headroom, specified THD values that are uncommon nowdays, and much more power.
By the way, I'm the guy with the 30 year old stereo.. Bought mine in 1981.
Often overlooked in a stereo is the speaker quality. The cabinet should be silent. First test of any speaker is to leave it off and knock on the back. Does it sound like a wooden shipping crate? If so, leave that one. The drivers will thump on the cabinet for you. Most big box speakers are made with the minimum size voice coil, magnet, and box thickness for shipping weight. Most of the big box stereo systems weigh less then one of my speakers. I just looked up the speck on my speakers. They are 68 Lbs each.
The light weight stuff simply does not match the fidelity or accuracy of the good stuff.
I agree, the net is good, but those who don't do the math will only see the large area of darker collectors as an area of soler heat collection and global warming. They don't take into consideration the alternative it is replacing. If you did paint the Sahara black, it would make a considerable temperature raise in the desert. This is the only thing they will point to.
I wonder when the climate change people will climb all over this for all the new land area converted from lighter colors that reflect light back into space into large areas of dark colors for the express purpose of converting more of the sun's energy to heat?
In one place there is a proposal to paint all the rooftops white to reduce global warming and in the next breath is to put up a bunch of dark color collectors to maximize the intake of energy (heat) for use.
Please don't avoid the issue by playing the Race Card. That is a cheap shot and totally avoids the issue.
Here is the issue. Has your income Doubled in the Last 5 years? Seriously, has it? Have your investments also doubled in value in the last 5 years?
Race card aside, take a look at the rate your Uncle Sam is blowing through money. They DOUBLED spending in the last 5 years. They didn't double income to pay for it. Fair share time. Double everyone's taxes and fees. Now instead of seeing about 1/2 my income vanish to taxes and fees, I would see almost all if it vanish. When it vanishes, what incentive do I have to keep working a producing. Doubling my taxes will not Double Revenue no matter how hard you seize my assets. You can take my assets only once while I am not working. After that I become a ward of the state.
The Al Gore global warming hockey stick is not the temperature rise, but the debt rise.
http://zfacts.com/p/1195.html Add the limit they are trying to add to this graph.
Care to play the class envy card or race card again and avoid the real issue of runaway spending and the upcoming hyperinflation. Playing class envy and the race card won't save us. Putting a cap on spending will, which is what the debt limit is.. a cap.
Often the runaway rate of borrowing is not understood by the public. As we add deficit spending to our debt the total debt quickly becomes a larger part of our GDP. As the debt spirals past the 100% of the GDP, the interest payments on the debt takes a huge portion of our GDP. This is followed by borrowing (or printing money) to keep up on the growing payments. As the dollar becomes devalued, it devalues at a faster rate as more money is borrowed or printed to pay it. Even more is borrowed to keep pace with baseline budgets for entitlement programs. This leads to over-taxation of the few working, investing, or saving. To prevent paying high service costs the interest rate is held artificially low while inflation raises prices. This puts banks in the red (guaranteed by the government) as the money devalues and the loan payments become trivial to the banks due to fixed rate loans. Non fixed rate loans such as credit cards will see a huge pressure for higher rates and fees. Low interest rate cards with no or low fees are going away rapidly.
Next this cycle spirals into hyperinflation.. Unless we cap our spending and balance the budget. Raising the cap faster than GDP growth is a fast track into devalued money, hyper-inflation, loss of jobs, poverty, and government collapse.
If we left the cap in place, and spent no more money than we take in, (balanced budget) the SPENDING level will be the same as it was only 5 years ago. This is the real story. we don't have a debt crisis, we have a spending crisis. Are you spending double what you were 5 years ago? If not then why? Why is it OK for the Government to spend recklessly?
Look up the Wikipedia article on Hyperinflation. Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.
If you call overseas often, one of the SIP phones is a good deal. For less than $15 (20 with taxes and E911 charge) unlimited calls to all of US and Canada in a base package or including ~35 other countries is possible. In plan is free regardless of destination. SIP to SIP is free like Skype to Skype. If you are really cheap, pick up a free SIP account from one of the free SIP account providers such as SIPgate, IPPI, IPTel, then pick up a free inward phone number from IPKall. This is $60 a year cheaper then Skype with a Skype-in number at $60 per year or $20/quarter. WIth an unlocked SIP analog phone adaptor, it will ring a POTS phone on your desk. No computer needs left on. Several of the free SIP providers include free voicemail as part of the package.
With a IPKall number, you can send your Google Voice number to it to ring your free phone and not use any cell minutes.
Unfortunately many of the recycled IPKall numbers were used to create overseas Google Voice accounts so they can't be used to forward your Google Voice as it is "Already Registered to two Google Voice Accounts". Keep trying until you get a number not already used. I'm hoping GV will be able to kick off the invalid users by requiring them to re-authenticate their number. This will free up the throw away numbers for the current owner to use.
I have a few options depending on how far back I want to go. If I want to go pre-transistor, I can fire up my Grandfather's portable radio. It is 5 tube and uses 3 batteries. It uses a 1.5 volt filament battery, a 9 volt bias battery, and a 45 volt B battery. I can't find the B battery any more but a few 9 volt batteries will do the job.
More recently I needed to recover some family history documents for a family member. They were properly backed up on 3.5 inch floppies. This required installing DOS 3.21 to do the restore, running Windows 3.1 to run PFS First Choice to open the documents (found them), then installing my old copy of Star Office which could then import the documents and keep the formatting, then save them in MS Word format. This enabled opening them on a more modern word processor. Since Windows 3.1 does not support USB or Networking, I had to save the result on 3.5 inch floppies, then load them into an old Windows 95 machine (again no USB support) to save them to a network drive.
Listening to the Data Guardian program make it's unique noise on the DOS/Windows machine was a true nostalgia hit. I should record the sound and save it as a ringtone.
When I lived overseas in a small country, the Internet was dialup at 25 cents US per minute. Needless to say that was basically no Internet. A home server was a must for our local content and we networked our printer for the family.
Here in the US, the benefit far outweighs the downside. The point is to make it save you money so it pretty much pays for itself. In this I include Netflix at under $10 a month as a replacement for a couple of DVD's rented per week at about $5 each (dated info. Redbox killed the rental store). I have dropped all magazine and newspaper subscriptions.
I have a SIP phone. With the purchase of a two line ATA, and the removal of long distance on the home phone, the paid plan allows unlimited calling all of the US and Canada for under $20/month + included minutes to 35 other countries. Unfortunately one country is not included, so the second line is set up to a SIP address. SIP to SIP is free anywhere worldwide. With a phone adapter calls simply ring a real phone. no computer needs to be on. Unlike Skype with a skype in number at $60/year or $20/quarter, the free SIP account includes a free inward number in the US and an iNum. It does not take too many benefits to justify a broadband connection at home. Put it to work and make it work for you. Don't waste your time on Facebook, farmville, WOW, and porn. There is more to the Internet than just Port 80.
Getting free updates and access to the Ubuntu Software Center is gravy on the cake.
Instead of PayPal.. I think the mobile phone payment system may get some traction. Even vending machines at work have that option now.
If you are one to give any credence to biblical prophecies, the chip in the cell phone will be moved where it can't be lost of stolen. It will be placed in the hand or forehead. After cash no longer exists, nobody will be able to buy or sell without the ID. It will be referred to as the mark of the beast.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/22/tech/main631231.shtml
Vending machines at work and the ticket booth at the local cinema has this up and running now. It is NOT Paypal. Paypal will be toast unless they change.
You might want to invest a little bit more to get reliable connections on the end and an impedence somewhere in the ball park.
They are to be 4 twisted pairs, each pair shielded.
Every manufacturer's HDMI cable is built to meet a nominal 100 ohm characteristic impedance, The best one can do is to hold impedance within a range, centered on 100 ohms; the official HDMI spec calls for 100 ohms plus or minus 15%, which for a coax would be horribly sloppy. The tighter that tolerance can be kept, the better the performance will be.
All that info and they don't even mention if it is CAT5 or CAT5E.