For example, after a car bomb detonates, one would have the ability to play high-resolution data backward in time to follows the vehicle back to the source, and then use that knowledge to focus collection and gain additional information by organizing and searching through archived data.
The irony being that the vast majority of car bombs reported in the media these days are in the last place these very same people "improved." Indeed they are a direct consequence of that improving.
Those that don't study history are doomed to repeat it. It's got to be even more embarassing when you created that screwed up history and prove to the world you still haven't learned.
Nationwide the cost could amount to $300 million per year. And, with ~300m people in the nation that works out to a staggering dollar each.
Even if you're only taxing working adults, that's maybe $3 to $4 a year.
What do you think the odds are that we'll actually pay that little? What are the odds there'll be a $30/PC tax or $15/household increase in garbage collection rates to cover the staggering burden that's barely a fraction of what they then charge?
I've no problem with paying what's reasonable. I find it interesting that the real number quoted works out roughly a buck a person per year though I'm yet to be charged a recycling fee even close to that small.
with a few smaller ewes instead? Speaking as someone who grew up on the border of Wales, can I recommend goats? They're like sheep but with the added convenience of handlebars.
$200,000 verizon dollars is only $2,000 US dollars... You're only partially right.
Whilst it's true, one Verizon dollar is only 10 cents (US), you forget the following:
10c/dollar usage fee during regular business hours (which strangely continue until 9pm)
$5.99/month fee to be allowed to use your dollars during the 6pm-9pm chunk of time they think are regular business hours that no one else seems to consider so.
Dollars can only be purchased in $5 blocks.
Mandatory government currency fee of $2.50.
$5.99/month Dollar Insurance Fee, just incase your cheaply made Verizon Dollar(tm) bills fall apart and you need replacement.
With all of these and others, whilst $200,000 Verizon dollars are only worth $2,000, you'll still strangely find your total bill coming in around $400,000 US.
He and his wife Mindy run a gaming center [snip]. For his business, he had six machines... and every one of them failed.
This isn't home use. This is a gaming center. Let's consider likely properties of a gaming center:
The machines are run all day, every day, far beyond typical usage.
The machines are likely secured to stop customers walking off with the $400 units. Entirely plausible is the possibility that the brackets used block airflow or, even worse, all six units, generating a ton of heat, are all kept in an enclosed closet.
The units are used by Joe Public. The average owner takes care of their precious investment. The average guy paying $x/hour for someone else's system is likely resting their drink... oops, just spilled it... on top of the system and doing a million other things they shouldn't be doing - like putting disks in with the same hand they just ate a slice of pizza with... times dozens of customers every day.
A couple of weeks ago, there was an article about how small third parties were getting a new tech out to the gulf far faster and cheaper than military procurement ever could. The point being that consumer grade vs. military grade implies a whole hell of a lot less ruggedizing, fault testing, etc. It's all a great time and cost saving - until the consumer unit fails and someone dies because of it where the slow, expensive military unit wouldn't have.
The same goes for individual vs. commercial use. A home console only needs to be so robust before it's good enough for home use. That same quality, when used in a commercial setting, is always going to fall down.
It's the same with cheap consumer cameras that'll get maybe 10,000 shutter actions and are tested for 50,000 - they are completely unsuitable for pros who know they'll be shooting a couple of hundred thousand shots.
The 360 is a home gaming system. It is not a well sealed, properly ventilated, secure, unit that's designed for all day, every day, month after month use.
Though that does raise the question as to whether Microsoft should release a $5,000 variant with a carousel disk loading mechanism that can only be stocked via a lockable panel, plenty of ventilation, sealing, etc. in a very large box and call it the commercial version, invalidating the warranties on guys like this who buy home versions and use them commercially.
That's nothing. I got Vista to run on a quad core, state of the art SLI system with only 4GB of ram.
OK, so it only sort of runs, the SLI doesn't actually work and a lot of the positional audio effects on my sound card have disappeared... but I'm hopeful that, with enough time for them to upgrade drivers, I may one day get it fully functional. Until then, Minesweeper is screamingly fast.
Wow. In only six weeks they've managed to estabilish exactly what Apple already said and, in a sensationalist bid, are framing exactly what was predicted as a terrible failure.
As another poster's written: Most people would buy Ferraris for $18,000 but less than 1% will at their current price... and Ferrari is absolutely fine with that.
In exactly the same way, Apple created a flagship brand that's not supposed to be owned by everyone but is supposed to increase brand awareness, move more people to iTunes and sell a hell of a lot of iPods to people who'd like to be able to upgrade "one day." Apple doesn't want the $50, minimal to no profits, tied to carriers for subsidies market. They chose their market, went after it, and all this article does is confirm their estimates were apparently exactly right. Given most companies over-estimate, 0.5% would have been a more realistic expectation based on a 1% prediction. That independent research supports 1% too is the shocking part.
n. in criminal law, the doctrine that evidence discovered due to information found through illegal search or other unconstitutional means (such as a forced confession) may not be introduced by a prosecutor. The theory is that the tree (original illegal evidence) is poisoned and thus taints what grows from it. For example, as part of a coerced admission made without giving a prime suspect the so-called "Miranda warnings" (statement of rights, including the right to remain silent and what he/she says will be used against them), the suspect tells the police the location of stolen property. Since the admission cannot be introduced as evidence in trial, neither can the stolen property. http://dictionary.law.com/definition2.asp?selected =795
I'm curious how evidence based on an illegal act could be made to hold up - even if it was a tip off from a private individual committing the illegal act as opposed to a government agency.
There were NOT 439,000 requests to tap phones. There were 439,000 requests for "communications information". This includes requests for lists of e-mail addresses, lists of numbers called, etc, in addition to taps. Either way... 439,000 requests for "something"
~30 terrorism related arrests.
That's a ratio of worse than 1:10,000 arrests per request.
Of those ~30 arrests, have any led to a successful prosecution yet?
Assuming they successfully prosecute someone, we're looking at roughly a one in half a million success rate. For pure fiscal efficiency, just throw random people in jail. It costs less and, statistically, you'll probably violate the rights of less innocent people anyway.
If I have a task that takes 100 seconds to run and I want it completed in under a second, scalability becomes a challenge... I have to figure out how to break it in to at least 100 distinct parts and deal with all of the communication lags associated. To have any kind of fault tolerance, I probably want to break it in to at least 1,000 tasks so that if one processor is running fast, it can get fed more and if one processor corrupts its process, I don't find out right at the end of the second, with no room to compensate, that I have to run re-run that full second's worth of processing elsewhere to make up for it. That's where the challenge comes in.
If I have a task that takes 100 seconds to run and all I'm trying to do is run it a lot of times over a period of time that's many times greater, I can run it 864 times a day per system with absolutely no scalability issues whatsoever and simply send the relatively small complete result sets back. With 100 systems, if each one can run a distinct task from start to finish, I'd be expecting pretty much dead on 100 times the total number crunching as there are absolutely no issues with task division, synchronization or network lag.
In this case, they ran 5,000 computers over 4 months. Assuming a single task is solvable in under 4 months by a single system, they should have had no difficult task division problems to solve, absolutely minimal synchronization issues and next to no lag issues to address. In short, even a pretty inefficient programmer should be able to approach 1:1 scalability in that easy of a scenario.
Efficiency of algorithms is a challenge when you want a single result fast. When you want many results and are prepared to wait so long as you're getting very many of them, that's an incredibly easy distributed computing problem.
I spent the last 90 minutes tracking "recent changes" undoing a bunch of "LOL PENIS" edits. Thanks a lot jerk. It took me three hours to do those. Jerk, meet penis. Penis, meet jerk. Something tells me you two have a beautiful, if lonely, future ahead of you.
I wonder if it's possible to get an otherwise invisible tattoo that reads, "By the way, that'll be $19.99/month. However, please limit your shots to those who consent in the future."
While people who own Blackberries feel 'more productive', those with Blackberrys are more likely to work longer hours and feel like they have less personal time than those without.
People who work harder on their careers at the expense of personal time tend to progress further than those who take an easier path and put personal time first.
Blackberries [at least initially] were a tool for managers and the most critical infrastructure staff as most companies wouldn't pay many hundreds to buy the hardware plus the service costs for the average employee to check email on the toilet.
So, one explanation is that people who were already obsessive about their careers and already obsessively shackled themselves to work anyway are the ones who gained Blackberries to simply maintain an existing destructive behavior.
Whilst it's easy to assume that Blackberries allow working out of hours and people are forced to work longer hours because they get a Blackberry, another explanation is that people get Blackberries because they're the kind of people looking to work longer hours (or at least stay obsessively aware of things which equates to the same thing).
It's easy to make the assumption that, because there's a correlation between A and B, there is the causation that A must clearly lead to B. It's just as possible that B actually leads to A. If B is a bad thing, we need to be careful not to assume A is thus the cause of a bad thing and therefore just as bad if not worse - it may just be that A is simply yet another symptom of the bad thing (B) itself.
It's kind of like saying, "People who stay in bed all day are much more likely to have the flu." The easy assumption to make there is that beds somehow lead to the flu. Easy. But totally wrong.
(as long as you've purchased your copy of OS X, you should be able to do what you like with it).
You don't own the software, you've bought a limited license to it. Whether we like it or not, courts have upheld shrinkwrapped licenses.
Thus, you have the right to use OS-X in exactly the way Apple specifies (i.e. on Apple hardware only) or, if you have never done so, return it for a full refund.
It may not be criminally illegal for you to violate that contract but it is a violation of a contract and thus illegal in the sense of prohibited by civil law.
Apple sells OS-X cheaply in order to sell the hardware it's locked to at a large markup. This isn't any different to Adobe giving away Acrobat reader to allow them to sell Acrobat at a huge markup or Microsoft giving away Internet Explorer to WGA validated Windows users.
It's not in Apple's interest to unbundle the two:
Apple has a finite list of hardware options they need to support. They don't need to worry about supporting that weird grey market motherboard or obscure Korean on board modem. They can keep their costs down by only supporting registered hardware. Microsoft balances the cost of a massive compatibility lab across 95% of the home market. Apple would have to balance it against 5%.
Apple can give away the razor and make its money on blades. Without the hardware markup subsidizing the OS, they'd likely have to jack the price up even higher.
We may not like it but Apple evidently has their reasons (whether arguably short sighted or not). That you buy a shrinkwrapped license, not ownership, means that: yes, legally, they do have the right to do so and you don't legally have the right to do as you wish.
Duke Nukem's producers at 3D Realms. If ever there was a team that showed dedication to a project far, far, far longer than it would have taken anyone else to have simply given up, it's them.
I salute them for refusing to go quietly in to that cold, dark night, regardless of the mounting evidence they actually have no idea how to launch a game whatsoever.
Also once it had been primed with several hours worth of diesel, it would be self supporting untill you either ran out of trash, or moved the unit somewhere and had to reprime it.
I'm curious. Why do you think they described it as 190% efficient if it's infinitely self supporting so long as it's supplied with trash?
Wouldn't it be in their best interests to run it for twice as long and call it 380% efficient? Ten times as long and call it 1900% efficient? etc.
At that point, surely the figures they'd be giving would be more like, "At the prototype scale, once primed, it can generate 20KW [or whatever the numbers are] so long as it remains fed on waste."?
It's the very fact that they give a percentage, not a sustainable output figure that makes me question whether what they're also doing is eating up a ton of enzymes that have to be replaced, continuing to burn traditional fuel to keep some part of it going, or some other concept that actually gives it a finite reward.
I'm hardly an expert on this kind of thing and I'd love to hear from someone that can educate me better. I'd just, from my basic understanding, expect to see power output figures for something sustainable rather than a percentage that implies a certain rate of return before that rate of return burns itself out.
What's your point? It's not supposed to generate fuel for Humvees, it's supposed to generate lots of electricity, directly.
My point is that nowhere does it say "lots of".
It says it generated 190% of what it consumed but absolutely no figures were given for what that was relative to.
IF it's 190% of a large amount, that's awesome. But, again, it never says that. And, just as possible, is that it's generating 190% of not a lot - in which case it raises all of the efficiency questions.
You're getting yourself all bent out of shape based on someone daring to suggest that a percentage of an unknown may be next-to-nothing just as it may be a hell of a lot and that, without that unknown, it's impossible to say.
At least I raised a question and acknowledged I was basing my assumptions on ranges of possibility. You're just jumping on the assumption that "Well it's for the troops so it must be super plus uber! Anything less is unAmerican" Yes, I exagerate but, really, you're jumping in with terms like idiotic over someone saying there are multiple possible interpretations and then you're jumping to a single near sighted conclusion.
Are you perhaps not aware that military forces need large supplies of electricity, just as much as they need fuel for their tanks?
Sure. Again, where does this say anything about large supplies?
That's an idiotic assumption to make. What makes you think this multi-ton diesel engine is going to only be equivalent of a small generator? I have no doubt it's aiming to replace the equally large generators, that are currently in-use by the US military. A tiny, lightweight generator isn't going to handle that kind of load.
Aiming to is not the same as does. Let's face it, if they could generate an impressive quantity of energy, can you think of any conceivable reason why they wouldn't be screaming that figure out to anyone who'd listen?
Half as many fuel shipments... Half as many people putting their lives on the line to truck in that fuel. Less fuel spent in the trucks (or planes) that actually hauls that fuel in. etc.
OK, basic math for you...
The energy required to ship it to the location is A. The energy it consumes is B.
If A+B > Bx1.9 then it makes sense to spend time hauling it there.
If A+B < Bx1.9 then it requires more energy to ship it that it ultimately rewards you with, making no sense to ship it there.
Yet again, we can make an educated guess on A given the quoted size (~that of a small van) but they make no mention of what B or Bx1.9 is. You can assume A is less than 0.9xB so it's efficient but that's just an assumption.
All I'm saying is, without knowing that, it's just as possible it's a nice curio but ultimately inefficient as it is possible that it's the wonderful gift from the Gods you've already decided it is.
I'm totally open to the possibility B is a very large number and it'll be a great thing. But the equal possibility (and arguably greater than equal as it'd be in their interest to shout the figure out if it were large) is that it's not.
If it's a large number, it absolutely saves service personel from harms way. Yay for it.
If it isn't a large number, there comes a point where it puts more people in harm's way, lugging something that heavy and bulky, than it saves with reduced fuel shipments.
Whether it does or doesn't reach that point, we've no way of knowing. All I'm saying is that, without knowing whether it actually achieves that, assuming it's a lifesaver is pretty flawed.
That's not even mentioning the perhaps equally large benefit of easy disposal of waste. Not having to ship it out to a dump in a war zone could save many lives, as well as even more fuel.
Again... Assuming it's in any way efficient.
If it can devour vast quantities, yay for it.
If it sits there and requires several extra service personel to be stuck in a warzone for mainten
OK, so it's 90% efficient, producing 190% of the fuel energy that's required to get it going.
The question is, how much power is that? And does it merit the machine's use.
Thinking about it, it requires a couple of hours running on diesel to prime itself - so a rough guess, assuming its engine is similar to that of a small car, would be that it takes half a dozen to a dozen gallons of diesel to prime it.
In exchange, you get 190% of that in low grade fuel that its robust enough generator can process. So the equivalent energy output of maybe two dozen gallons of diesel but in a low enough grade form that you wouldn't want to put it near a regular engine.
The unit's described as about the size of a small van. Except it's likely denser so let's guess around five tons and it's cumbersome as all hell.
So, end result, you get the equivalent power output of maybe ten gallons of diesel, in a form you can't use to actually power anything much else, several hours later... in a form that likely consumes far more than that ten gallons or so to get it in to the field it's supposed to be used in.
It's cool as a concept but 190% of not a lot is still not a lot - and when the pain of getting it there and waiting for it outweighs the 90% of not a lot extra you get, it starts making more sense on efficiency grounds to stick with lugging a small generator and a couple of five gallon cans of a far more usable fuel.
In short: Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should do it.
But I'm guessing the publicity will get them their second round funding, which is, I'm guessing, the real point of this.;)
First, let me say I'm a relatively hardcore gamer...
I custom build my own rigs, I made it to Elite in the game of the same name back in the 80s, I completed Doom countless times, I've owned every car in Gran Turismo 1 and 2, I've logged months in various versions of Civ. I even became a coder, wrote my own games as a kid and went on to work for a major game publisher and anyone that creates an account on the PS3 or buys from its store sees code I wrote.
But there's one game that I just can't beat. I swear, I've played it endlessly and still can't seem to complete it, find a completion screen, anything!
Considering that an individual can be detained and questioned by the FBI for photographing a bridge in this country, why should this Canadian company get a free pass?
Who said anything about them getting a free pass?
The FBI detains people they have reasonable grounds to be suspicious of plotting an act of terrorism. If they suspect these people of plotting terrorism, they'll most likely detain them until their story can be confirmed too. There's absolutely no difference in treatment nor any kind of free pass being given.
Similarly, if the guy photographing the bridge contacted the local police department and said, "Hey, I'm going to be photographing such and such a bridge. If you want to run any background checks to verify I'm not a terrorist, go right ahead. No, you can't tell me not to do it - it's a legal right - you can only confirm I'm doing it for lawful reasons which I both am and am giving you an opportunity to check in advance." they would most likely have completely ignored him. I'm guessing, to simply avoid hassle, this company's going to have a prepared statement and will contact local PDs before going in to each area too.
In short, it's totally legal to do things like film a scene of a kidnapping but you're most likely going to get temporarily detained if you don't notify the police first. Film companies don't get a "free pass" either - they simply make sure the police are notified. The same goes for fears of terrorism and photographing potential targets and fears of burglary and and photographing homes.
Is it unfortunate that we're in a world where the gut reaction is to arrest first and ask questions later? Sure. But that should be addressed on its own merits rather than accusing people who're smart enough to recognize it sadly happens and thus take precautions of getting some kind of a free pass.
This sort of thing is happenning all over the world, including the US and many other English speaking nations.
But suddenly, because its France, its due to anti-Americanism (in spite the fact that many of the distributed apps are written in the US) and anti-English (although all commercial equivilants to the distributed apps have french localisation).
Exactly!
Damn French! Most English people have been anti-American for ages but all of a sudden, along come the French, gain all the credit and manage to make it look cool in the process!
I demand other nations, beyond the French, get equal credit for loathing the current American administration.
Can you really call the most current generation that actually works "Last Generation"?
As things stand, I was under the impression that all Vista does for gaming is disable features you have under XP. Oooh... And give you a couple of exciting menus for games and game specs.
Giving notice is purely a courtesy. It legally can not affect recommendations or references.
And yet there's a world of difference between, "He attended. I'm sorry, I legally can't comment on any issues we had beyond that." and "Wow, Dave? He's really missed around here. Yeah, he definitely worked here - amazing work. I know I'm not supposed to say more than that but... how can I help?"
Slashdot Mirror
For example, after a car bomb detonates, one would have the ability to play high-resolution data backward in time to follows the vehicle back to the source, and then use that knowledge to focus collection and gain additional information by organizing and searching through archived data.
The irony being that the vast majority of car bombs reported in the media these days are in the last place these very same people "improved." Indeed they are a direct consequence of that improving.
Those that don't study history are doomed to repeat it. It's got to be even more embarassing when you created that screwed up history and prove to the world you still haven't learned.
Even if you're only taxing working adults, that's maybe $3 to $4 a year.
What do you think the odds are that we'll actually pay that little? What are the odds there'll be a $30/PC tax or $15/household increase in garbage collection rates to cover the staggering burden that's barely a fraction of what they then charge?
I've no problem with paying what's reasonable. I find it interesting that the real number quoted works out roughly a buck a person per year though I'm yet to be charged a recycling fee even close to that small.
...When they decided to turn Wii in to whine.
Whilst it's true, one Verizon dollar is only 10 cents (US), you forget the following:
- 10c/dollar usage fee during regular business hours (which strangely continue until 9pm)
- $5.99/month fee to be allowed to use your dollars during the 6pm-9pm chunk of time they think are regular business hours that no one else seems to consider so.
- Dollars can only be purchased in $5 blocks.
- Mandatory government currency fee of $2.50.
- $5.99/month Dollar Insurance Fee, just incase your cheaply made Verizon Dollar(tm) bills fall apart and you need replacement.
With all of these and others, whilst $200,000 Verizon dollars are only worth $2,000, you'll still strangely find your total bill coming in around $400,000 US.This isn't home use. This is a gaming center. Let's consider likely properties of a gaming center:
A couple of weeks ago, there was an article about how small third parties were getting a new tech out to the gulf far faster and cheaper than military procurement ever could. The point being that consumer grade vs. military grade implies a whole hell of a lot less ruggedizing, fault testing, etc. It's all a great time and cost saving - until the consumer unit fails and someone dies because of it where the slow, expensive military unit wouldn't have.
The same goes for individual vs. commercial use. A home console only needs to be so robust before it's good enough for home use. That same quality, when used in a commercial setting, is always going to fall down.
It's the same with cheap consumer cameras that'll get maybe 10,000 shutter actions and are tested for 50,000 - they are completely unsuitable for pros who know they'll be shooting a couple of hundred thousand shots.
The 360 is a home gaming system. It is not a well sealed, properly ventilated, secure, unit that's designed for all day, every day, month after month use.
Though that does raise the question as to whether Microsoft should release a $5,000 variant with a carousel disk loading mechanism that can only be stocked via a lockable panel, plenty of ventilation, sealing, etc. in a very large box and call it the commercial version, invalidating the warranties on guys like this who buy home versions and use them commercially.
That's nothing. I got Vista to run on a quad core, state of the art SLI system with only 4GB of ram.
OK, so it only sort of runs, the SLI doesn't actually work and a lot of the positional audio effects on my sound card have disappeared... but I'm hopeful that, with enough time for them to upgrade drivers, I may one day get it fully functional. Until then, Minesweeper is screamingly fast.
"Apple launches the iPhone, aiming for one percent of the global mobile market." - 1/10/2007
Study: Consumers aren't willing to pay $500 for iPhone "only 1 percent said they'd pay US$500 for it" - 2/23/2007
Wow. In only six weeks they've managed to estabilish exactly what Apple already said and, in a sensationalist bid, are framing exactly what was predicted as a terrible failure.
As another poster's written: Most people would buy Ferraris for $18,000 but less than 1% will at their current price... and Ferrari is absolutely fine with that.
In exactly the same way, Apple created a flagship brand that's not supposed to be owned by everyone but is supposed to increase brand awareness, move more people to iTunes and sell a hell of a lot of iPods to people who'd like to be able to upgrade "one day." Apple doesn't want the $50, minimal to no profits, tied to carriers for subsidies market. They chose their market, went after it, and all this article does is confirm their estimates were apparently exactly right. Given most companies over-estimate, 0.5% would have been a more realistic expectation based on a 1% prediction. That independent research supports 1% too is the shocking part.
I'm curious how evidence based on an illegal act could be made to hold up - even if it was a tip off from a private individual committing the illegal act as opposed to a government agency.
~30 terrorism related arrests.
That's a ratio of worse than 1:10,000 arrests per request.
Of those ~30 arrests, have any led to a successful prosecution yet?
Assuming they successfully prosecute someone, we're looking at roughly a one in half a million success rate. For pure fiscal efficiency, just throw random people in jail. It costs less and, statistically, you'll probably violate the rights of less innocent people anyway.
Worse...
It's over 4 months, not a fraction of a second.
If I have a task that takes 100 seconds to run and I want it completed in under a second, scalability becomes a challenge... I have to figure out how to break it in to at least 100 distinct parts and deal with all of the communication lags associated. To have any kind of fault tolerance, I probably want to break it in to at least 1,000 tasks so that if one processor is running fast, it can get fed more and if one processor corrupts its process, I don't find out right at the end of the second, with no room to compensate, that I have to run re-run that full second's worth of processing elsewhere to make up for it. That's where the challenge comes in.
If I have a task that takes 100 seconds to run and all I'm trying to do is run it a lot of times over a period of time that's many times greater, I can run it 864 times a day per system with absolutely no scalability issues whatsoever and simply send the relatively small complete result sets back. With 100 systems, if each one can run a distinct task from start to finish, I'd be expecting pretty much dead on 100 times the total number crunching as there are absolutely no issues with task division, synchronization or network lag.
In this case, they ran 5,000 computers over 4 months. Assuming a single task is solvable in under 4 months by a single system, they should have had no difficult task division problems to solve, absolutely minimal synchronization issues and next to no lag issues to address. In short, even a pretty inefficient programmer should be able to approach 1:1 scalability in that easy of a scenario.
Efficiency of algorithms is a challenge when you want a single result fast. When you want many results and are prepared to wait so long as you're getting very many of them, that's an incredibly easy distributed computing problem.
I wonder if it's possible to get an otherwise invisible tattoo that reads, "By the way, that'll be $19.99/month. However, please limit your shots to those who consent in the future."
While people who own Blackberries feel 'more productive', those with Blackberrys are more likely to work longer hours and feel like they have less personal time than those without.
People who work harder on their careers at the expense of personal time tend to progress further than those who take an easier path and put personal time first.
Blackberries [at least initially] were a tool for managers and the most critical infrastructure staff as most companies wouldn't pay many hundreds to buy the hardware plus the service costs for the average employee to check email on the toilet.
So, one explanation is that people who were already obsessive about their careers and already obsessively shackled themselves to work anyway are the ones who gained Blackberries to simply maintain an existing destructive behavior.
Whilst it's easy to assume that Blackberries allow working out of hours and people are forced to work longer hours because they get a Blackberry, another explanation is that people get Blackberries because they're the kind of people looking to work longer hours (or at least stay obsessively aware of things which equates to the same thing).
It's easy to make the assumption that, because there's a correlation between A and B, there is the causation that A must clearly lead to B. It's just as possible that B actually leads to A. If B is a bad thing, we need to be careful not to assume A is thus the cause of a bad thing and therefore just as bad if not worse - it may just be that A is simply yet another symptom of the bad thing (B) itself.
It's kind of like saying, "People who stay in bed all day are much more likely to have the flu." The easy assumption to make there is that beds somehow lead to the flu. Easy. But totally wrong.
You don't own the software, you've bought a limited license to it. Whether we like it or not, courts have upheld shrinkwrapped licenses.
Thus, you have the right to use OS-X in exactly the way Apple specifies (i.e. on Apple hardware only) or, if you have never done so, return it for a full refund.
It may not be criminally illegal for you to violate that contract but it is a violation of a contract and thus illegal in the sense of prohibited by civil law.
Apple sells OS-X cheaply in order to sell the hardware it's locked to at a large markup. This isn't any different to Adobe giving away Acrobat reader to allow them to sell Acrobat at a huge markup or Microsoft giving away Internet Explorer to WGA validated Windows users.
It's not in Apple's interest to unbundle the two:
We may not like it but Apple evidently has their reasons (whether arguably short sighted or not). That you buy a shrinkwrapped license, not ownership, means that: yes, legally, they do have the right to do so and you don't legally have the right to do as you wish.
Duke Nukem's producers at 3D Realms. If ever there was a team that showed dedication to a project far, far, far longer than it would have taken anyone else to have simply given up, it's them.
I salute them for refusing to go quietly in to that cold, dark night, regardless of the mounting evidence they actually have no idea how to launch a game whatsoever.
Also once it had been primed with several hours worth of diesel, it would be self supporting untill you either ran out of trash, or moved the unit somewhere and had to reprime it.
I'm curious. Why do you think they described it as 190% efficient if it's infinitely self supporting so long as it's supplied with trash?
Wouldn't it be in their best interests to run it for twice as long and call it 380% efficient? Ten times as long and call it 1900% efficient? etc.
At that point, surely the figures they'd be giving would be more like, "At the prototype scale, once primed, it can generate 20KW [or whatever the numbers are] so long as it remains fed on waste."?
It's the very fact that they give a percentage, not a sustainable output figure that makes me question whether what they're also doing is eating up a ton of enzymes that have to be replaced, continuing to burn traditional fuel to keep some part of it going, or some other concept that actually gives it a finite reward.
I'm hardly an expert on this kind of thing and I'd love to hear from someone that can educate me better. I'd just, from my basic understanding, expect to see power output figures for something sustainable rather than a percentage that implies a certain rate of return before that rate of return burns itself out.
What's your point? It's not supposed to generate fuel for Humvees, it's supposed to generate lots of electricity, directly.
My point is that nowhere does it say "lots of".
It says it generated 190% of what it consumed but absolutely no figures were given for what that was relative to.
IF it's 190% of a large amount, that's awesome. But, again, it never says that. And, just as possible, is that it's generating 190% of not a lot - in which case it raises all of the efficiency questions.
You're getting yourself all bent out of shape based on someone daring to suggest that a percentage of an unknown may be next-to-nothing just as it may be a hell of a lot and that, without that unknown, it's impossible to say.
At least I raised a question and acknowledged I was basing my assumptions on ranges of possibility. You're just jumping on the assumption that "Well it's for the troops so it must be super plus uber! Anything less is unAmerican" Yes, I exagerate but, really, you're jumping in with terms like idiotic over someone saying there are multiple possible interpretations and then you're jumping to a single near sighted conclusion.
Are you perhaps not aware that military forces need large supplies of electricity, just as much as they need fuel for their tanks?
Sure. Again, where does this say anything about large supplies?
That's an idiotic assumption to make. What makes you think this multi-ton diesel engine is going to only be equivalent of a small generator? I have no doubt it's aiming to replace the equally large generators, that are currently in-use by the US military. A tiny, lightweight generator isn't going to handle that kind of load.
Aiming to is not the same as does. Let's face it, if they could generate an impressive quantity of energy, can you think of any conceivable reason why they wouldn't be screaming that figure out to anyone who'd listen?
Half as many fuel shipments... Half as many people putting their lives on the line to truck in that fuel. Less fuel spent in the trucks (or planes) that actually hauls that fuel in. etc.
OK, basic math for you...
The energy required to ship it to the location is A.
The energy it consumes is B.
If A+B > Bx1.9 then it makes sense to spend time hauling it there.
If A+B < Bx1.9 then it requires more energy to ship it that it ultimately rewards you with, making no sense to ship it there.
Yet again, we can make an educated guess on A given the quoted size (~that of a small van) but they make no mention of what B or Bx1.9 is. You can assume A is less than 0.9xB so it's efficient but that's just an assumption.
All I'm saying is, without knowing that, it's just as possible it's a nice curio but ultimately inefficient as it is possible that it's the wonderful gift from the Gods you've already decided it is.
I'm totally open to the possibility B is a very large number and it'll be a great thing. But the equal possibility (and arguably greater than equal as it'd be in their interest to shout the figure out if it were large) is that it's not.
If it's a large number, it absolutely saves service personel from harms way. Yay for it.
If it isn't a large number, there comes a point where it puts more people in harm's way, lugging something that heavy and bulky, than it saves with reduced fuel shipments.
Whether it does or doesn't reach that point, we've no way of knowing. All I'm saying is that, without knowing whether it actually achieves that, assuming it's a lifesaver is pretty flawed.
That's not even mentioning the perhaps equally large benefit of easy disposal of waste. Not having to ship it out to a dump in a war zone could save many lives, as well as even more fuel.
Again... Assuming it's in any way efficient.
If it can devour vast quantities, yay for it.
If it sits there and requires several extra service personel to be stuck in a warzone for mainten
Hmm, powered on trash you say?
Sure, this is only a small amount of power when given a small amount of trash.
But think what a big enough one could do with New Jersey!
If there are efficiencies of scale, mankind's dreams of infinite free power could finally be realized.
OK, so it's 90% efficient, producing 190% of the fuel energy that's required to get it going.
;)
The question is, how much power is that? And does it merit the machine's use.
Thinking about it, it requires a couple of hours running on diesel to prime itself - so a rough guess, assuming its engine is similar to that of a small car, would be that it takes half a dozen to a dozen gallons of diesel to prime it.
In exchange, you get 190% of that in low grade fuel that its robust enough generator can process. So the equivalent energy output of maybe two dozen gallons of diesel but in a low enough grade form that you wouldn't want to put it near a regular engine.
The unit's described as about the size of a small van. Except it's likely denser so let's guess around five tons and it's cumbersome as all hell.
So, end result, you get the equivalent power output of maybe ten gallons of diesel, in a form you can't use to actually power anything much else, several hours later... in a form that likely consumes far more than that ten gallons or so to get it in to the field it's supposed to be used in.
It's cool as a concept but 190% of not a lot is still not a lot - and when the pain of getting it there and waiting for it outweighs the 90% of not a lot extra you get, it starts making more sense on efficiency grounds to stick with lugging a small generator and a couple of five gallon cans of a far more usable fuel.
In short: Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should do it.
But I'm guessing the publicity will get them their second round funding, which is, I'm guessing, the real point of this.
First, let me say I'm a relatively hardcore gamer...
I custom build my own rigs, I made it to Elite in the game of the same name back in the 80s, I completed Doom countless times, I've owned every car in Gran Turismo 1 and 2, I've logged months in various versions of Civ. I even became a coder, wrote my own games as a kid and went on to work for a major game publisher and anyone that creates an account on the PS3 or buys from its store sees code I wrote.
But there's one game that I just can't beat. I swear, I've played it endlessly and still can't seem to complete it, find a completion screen, anything!
Bejewelled.
Casual game, my ass!
Considering that an individual can be detained and questioned by the FBI for photographing a bridge in this country, why should this Canadian company get a free pass?
Who said anything about them getting a free pass?
The FBI detains people they have reasonable grounds to be suspicious of plotting an act of terrorism. If they suspect these people of plotting terrorism, they'll most likely detain them until their story can be confirmed too. There's absolutely no difference in treatment nor any kind of free pass being given.
Similarly, if the guy photographing the bridge contacted the local police department and said, "Hey, I'm going to be photographing such and such a bridge. If you want to run any background checks to verify I'm not a terrorist, go right ahead. No, you can't tell me not to do it - it's a legal right - you can only confirm I'm doing it for lawful reasons which I both am and am giving you an opportunity to check in advance." they would most likely have completely ignored him. I'm guessing, to simply avoid hassle, this company's going to have a prepared statement and will contact local PDs before going in to each area too.
In short, it's totally legal to do things like film a scene of a kidnapping but you're most likely going to get temporarily detained if you don't notify the police first. Film companies don't get a "free pass" either - they simply make sure the police are notified. The same goes for fears of terrorism and photographing potential targets and fears of burglary and and photographing homes.
Is it unfortunate that we're in a world where the gut reaction is to arrest first and ask questions later? Sure. But that should be addressed on its own merits rather than accusing people who're smart enough to recognize it sadly happens and thus take precautions of getting some kind of a free pass.
This sort of thing is happenning all over the world, including the US and many other English speaking nations.
But suddenly, because its France, its due to anti-Americanism (in spite the fact that many of the distributed apps are written in the US) and anti-English (although all commercial equivilants to the distributed apps have french localisation).
Exactly!
Damn French! Most English people have been anti-American for ages but all of a sudden, along come the French, gain all the credit and manage to make it look cool in the process!
I demand other nations, beyond the French, get equal credit for loathing the current American administration.
Generation XP: Top 20 Games of the Last Generation
Given there's one DX-10 card line out there - nVidia's - and they're facing a class action lawsuit because their Vista ready card isn't Vista ready... Given that Vista takes away several audio features from Creative's line of sound cards... Given that the best known technical name in the gaming industry says it's not worth bothering with...
Can you really call the most current generation that actually works "Last Generation"?
As things stand, I was under the impression that all Vista does for gaming is disable features you have under XP. Oooh... And give you a couple of exciting menus for games and game specs.
Giving notice is purely a courtesy. It legally can not affect recommendations or references.
And yet there's a world of difference between, "He attended. I'm sorry, I legally can't comment on any issues we had beyond that." and "Wow, Dave? He's really missed around here. Yeah, he definitely worked here - amazing work. I know I'm not supposed to say more than that but... how can I help?"