Remember... Sun didn't write the original article, nor the article on/. Sun's image is regularly damaged by mistatements like this and the negative opinions they generate.
As someone who works for Sun I'll just say that as with -any- reasonably large company there are people who don't understand the distinctions between "available source code" and "Open Source".
However, a large number do. And many software sales people you might speak to would realize that while many (most... probably 99%) of the pieces of the Java Desktop System are Open Source, that as a whole it is not since there are some small proprietary pieces (a small bit from SuSE since we OEM their distro and an even smaller amount that enables communication between the desktop clients and the management servers).
Most will also understand that OpenOffice is Open Source and that StarOffice is the same as JDS in this respect... 99% Open Source but not Open Source itself.
Java is obviously a similar situation.
I'm not saying everyone at Sun "gets it", and even when they "get it" sometimes the spirit is lost (I get as tired as you of hearing someone say "but the source code is available" when told that X is not Open Sourced). However your post goes beyond an honest admission and implies a generality that is not true. And Sun most definitely contribute enough to the Open Source arena (pet peeve... why is it that that is so easily forgetten just because Sun chooses to not make every last line of code in commercial products open? The contributions are still just as valid... ) and deserves better than to get trounced every time some journalist shows their ignorance.
BTW, I don't see in the article where it said Sun's "runtime" was Open Source... it does say that about the Desktop (and it is more true about the Desktop).
NOTE: I'm not saying any of the above is the right or wrong way for Sun to license things... I'm just pointing out the reality that Sun's employees are not as daft as you seem to imply.
There has been a good SuSE (actually in this case Java Desktop System) Linux business laptop that "just works" out for 9 months now. The Tadpole Talin 15". The also now have the 12 inch screen model available.
Not as big a brand name as HP... but then again HP's brandname hasn't been that great for awhile now anyway.
The Tadpole machines may be more expensive (no way for me to know, I got my Talin 15 as a demo box and their website doesn't say) so I'm not saying you should definitely get this one over the HP box if that is a concern... just pointing out some other alternatives.
These only address the bugs/glitches in NWN. NWN, while a very good engine in many ways, is extremely lacking in D&D human experience.
I would really like to see NWN2's engine allow for voice chat and webcams. Sure, you could run these things on the side but alot of people don't have 2 computers and these would need to be run simultaneously.
You're kidding, right? I've been with 12 people in my life... no way could I get through the US population in my lifetime. However this does work good as a blanket statement for the following.
Fuck the President.
No. No no no.
Fuck your mom.
My Oedipal complex went away when I was 13, thanks
Fuck you.
That one's easy but not so much fun.
Fuck your friends
If I can pick and choose, gladly. Otherwise I'd have to say no.
fuck the Senate
Have you SEEN those people... well... at least Strom Thurmond is gone.
fuck the House
Ok, so maybe there are a couple in there.
fuck all goverment employees.
Only if I can start at the interstate tollbooth, there's usually a couple hotties there. If I have to start at the DMV... yeesh, have you SEEN those people? Oh wait, I said that about the Senate... ok, so I'd take this category over that one.
But Hypertransport, which is a large part of what makes the Opteron/Athlon64 perform so well under load, was from a technology used for DEC Alpha buses.
Not dying, but definitely beginning to flounder. DirecTV is most likely going to switch to a homegrown box in the next year or two. TiVo has no other deals (at least none that are public yet) with large providers and that is really what would keep their current business afloat for the long-haul.
I still have hopes that they'll make a digital cable version of their HDTiVo and that then they'll be able to ink some serious deals. However if that doesn't happen they are in serious trouble in the not too distant future. Between Moxi, NDS (the DVR that DirecTV will begin using next year in conjunction with TiVo boxes if rumors are true), embedded players like MontaVista (who don't sell anything direct but have been working with Japanese DVR manufacturers) and various knock-offs and cheap (cheap being good in the mass-market STB world even at the expense of features).
Perhaps TiVo will cut out a new niche, but it will be alot harder to do that with something other than TV since that is what 99% of the consumers think of when they think entertainment.
That's what I thought before reading the links, but if you look at the diagram in the first article link it would appear that that water is not returned (directly) to the lake. It is used for city water. So any damage done to the lake is already being done today (siphoning off of water)
That city water would be heated anyway in the process of usage. So the heat added to the air or lake are both negligible. And in fact the heat generated by air conditioning units would likely be siginificantly higher.
Also, if there is a 75% reduction in power costs used to chill those buildings, then the heat used to generate that 75% power is also reduced. It may not be local to the lake area but still a Good Thing overall. Very similar to using geothermal heat in the winter.
Plain and simply I will never buy online music until I can get lossless CD quality recordings for less than I can buy a physical CD.
I understand DRM and don't have a big issue with it when it comes down to it (I don't -like- it but as long as it gives me my fair use I'll live with it).
I'm simply not willing to pay for lossy encodings. I would rather pay $9.99 for an album that is CD quality than $4.99 for a lossy encoded version. I would prefer it to be like FLAC where it is a compressed file, but nothing less than CD quality. CD is the -minimum- I am looking for. However I should be able to buy for $4.99 + a small added bandwith charge.
Will I rip down to a smaller format for my portable player? Sure... but I'll be able to listen to my lossless version on my home system and I'll be able to reencode if a better format comes out in the future.
Until then, since I buy less than 1 disc a month, I'll stick with hardcopy.
If you mean distributing the entire game in source form, I strongly disagree.
High profile games like NWN and Doom3 usually are brought to market with significant new technology. Even a source obscuration is not going to prevent a decent programmer from reverse engineering how you did fancy whizbang things #2.
Many companies make a large chunk of their money by releasing a game with only a moderate storyline but a bunch of new engine features, and then license their engine (id being the most successful at this). At the same time, many of these companies (again, id being best at it) do not seem that interested in software patents and often will release hooks and eventually entire code chunks when they have moved to a new game. It does not make any sense for them to hand out the source code to their games with this model being successful for all involved (except people installing on Linux).
In an ideal world where everyone obeyed not just the law but it's spirit in regards to copyrighted source code, full source distribution would work. We don't live in that world.
If you mean that the installer should be distributed in source format, that I most definitely can see. However, I think I would prefer to see installers done in Java so that you could have a single installer on all platforms. The -game- doesn't need to be in Java, just the installer. Perhaps also distribute the installer's Java source.
However none of the above addresses library incompatibilities/dependencies. Yes, the idea of distributing the entire game in source code -would- do that but I just don't see that being viable for the gaming market even with a restrictive license. Static binaries would help, though they would be huge. In the end the "right" answer is still to have a solid LSB standard (ie, freeze a branch and know that ISVs will not adopt a new one for at least 2-3 years) and for users to require their distributions to fully support a common LSB standard. We have gotten close (and less close) over the last couple of years but it still seems that this is not to the place we as users need it to be.
Doesn't seem like a fair comparison to me for 2 reasons:
1) The "Unix Wars" of the late 80's / early 90's were primarily due to various vendors trying to lock people in. See this article as one example. In fact it was this very action that many analysts say opened the door for Microsoft to succeed in moving into the market with Windows NT.
2) [hinted at above] Microsoft was not competing in the same market as Unix or mainframes with Windows 3.0... Windows 3.x was almost purely a desktop with some small chunk of the workgroup server space. This didn't change until Windows NT (yes, NT shared the 3.1 version but was extremely different). And Windows NT didn't start eating into the SMB server market significantly until NT 4.0, which was LONG after the Unix Wars has ended.
Posit that in a few years/decades we may have discovered yet another communication method that is better than radio/laser/etc. And another few decades or centuries later something else comes along.
If other technological cultures (note: we're assuming alot in assuming that another culture would embrace tech in the same manner as we have) follow a similar pattern, we have a very very tiny window to catch the signal. Compound that with need to have the signal's origination coincide perfectly with the time it needs to travel to us during a time when we have the right technology level to understand that it is a signal.
I love the idea of SETI, but overall I find it extremely unlikely it will be successful while we are so relatively primitive. I believe that technological evolution will progress to the point where there is a "best" method of communication and if other cultures progress technologically that we will all end up at the same point and possibly be able to discover each other, but I doubt we are anywhere near that level and perhaps no one else is either.
The year is 2009 (corresponds with the start date of both shows)... the show is "Happy Days: The Cunninghams", a sequel/prequel about Howard Cunningham's parents in the year 1923. Enter a 65+ year old fat Arthur Fonzarelli, who has been resurrected after being killed in the 7th iteration of "Happy Days: Generations", brought in to revive "The Cunninghams" to water ski over a shark for a second time after previous episodes destroyed the timeline so that the first jumping of the shark will have never -really- happened without this 2-part guest appearance.
Umm... no. Crossovers are one thing. Shatner on Enterprise is just silly. My TiVo just lost a season pass.
That isn't sarcasm, that's the truth. You either haven't been here long or have somehow missed the AMD bias.
1)/. wouldn't exist if it didn't bring OSDN revenue (at least not as an OSDN product). That revenue comes from ads. If you were to look at the computing product ads that appear, I would say more seem to be featuring AMD boxes than not (example, the Sun ad for AMD Opteron servers flashed in front of my eyes not long ago).
2) The/. ads wouldn't get viewed if people didn't come here to read articles. AMD seems to be the x86 processor brand of choice for alot of readers (partially due to the point in #3 to follow) and so it only makes sense to have a bias towards what so many readers want.
3) Even without ads and without readers, the people who started and maintain/. have a fairly counter-culture bent to them (at least counter to the culture of a couple of years ago:). AMD is the counter-culture answer to Intel for x86 chips.
4) The poster submitted the story, not the mods, so the quote show the poster's bias. Note that by accepting it the mods have accepted a link to a site that shows AMD as -losing- this benchmark. I can say from my experience that mods only edit submissions if there is something like a bad link. Bad grammar and opinionation are always retained if the submission is accepted.
So... welcome to/.... where no one ever said life was going to be unbiased or even fair.
The evaluation requires multiple points before you can determine worth:
1) How much does it cost to produce a square foot of this solar panel?
2) Same question as #1 for the glass that would be used normally?
3) How much energy will this solar panel -leak- over the expected life span of the installation?
4) Same as #3 for regular glass?
5) What is the energy gained by the solar collection process?
6) After all factors considered, is the cost of the solar panel compared to regular glass over the lifespan of both higher (bad) or lower (good)?
Illustration (all assumptions):
* Assume the installation has an expected life span of 10 years (I would hope the lifespan of skyscraper glass would be more like 40-50 years or more, but that is a pain to calculate).
* Assume that the glass installation costs $1,000 (we're talking a big piece of skyscraper glass here, ok?)
* Assume solar panel costs 10x the normal glass installation, $10,000
* Assume that each year the regular glass will cost 1/2 again the initial cost in energy loss (probably a pretty drastic assumption but it makes things easy)... $500/year
* Assume that each year the solar glass will net 1/2 again the initial cost of -regular- glass each year (another drastic assumption)... $500/year... that net meaning that it paid for the energy lost through it and had dividend above that mark (ok, so extremely drastic)
Factored together, after 10 years the regular glass net cost was $6,000 whereas the solar glass net cost was $5,000 (and also helped subsidize the cost, making future installations less costly).
Of course, being assumptions you could easily make an example where the reverse was true and the solar glass was more expensive over 10 years (again, hoping that 10 years is a small chunk of the real installation).
My point is pretty small for all of the above... that ecological costing is actually fairly complex and is why the public often doesn't "get it". Maybe we need to go to the utility model for things such as this as well. That is only partial sarcasm, BTW, it could actually make a lot of sense to figure out a model whereby such things could be scaled out over time so that the initial aquisition was not prohibitive.
YES... that damned Panasonic 2.4GHz phone was the pits for wireless... it would knock out not just my internal 802.11b but my directional 802.11b wireless ISP connection (the antenna was on the ROOF and on the outside of the HOUSE pointed AWAY from the phone's base and the Panasonic could kill it from the opposite side of the house). Whenever we would get a call I would have to answer it and hit the "channel" button
We have a sincere suspicion that my neighbor grabbed the phone from the trash or bought an identical model since when they get calls my net connection gets very fuzzy (but not gone).
No... my Siemens gear does not interfere with anything. I've owned 2 different Gigaset base stations (first one got water damage from a snow storm) with 4 phones placed around the house and I can be on 2 different lines with handsets and have no trouble with either 802.11b network.
The Siemens gear is fairly expensive ($300 for the base I think and about $100 per handset) but if you work at home and require 802.11b it is a worthwhile contender.
It is not that the technology isn't yet good enough to detect small planets... it is more severe than that. The technology we are using to detect planets specifically is geared towards finding the large gas giants.
If you do a grep for the wrong pattern, you're not going to find the pattern you are looking for.
Additionally, we can only scan a small chunk of the galaxy, much less the universe as a whole.
Probability is still WAY on the side of other earthlike or at least life sustaining planets existing. Hell, we are finding life in so MANY places that we thought were uninhabitable that it probably can form in any environment with liquid water and a sustainable energy source.
That only covers a small chunk of what we are secretly hoping/dreading finding. Next we would want to find not just a planet, not just life, but intelligent life. Given how intelligence probably evolved in people, we will need to find a massive amount of life before finding intelligence.
Then to find civilization of some form that intelligence has to survive into the maturing process (a point we haven't passed yet ourselves) or we have to get lucky enough to find it before it dies off (and before we die off).
Chances of anyone from Earth ever seeing an alien culture? Pretty slim, but a large part of that is the question of our ultimate survival. Chances of civilization existing at some point somewhere in the universe? IMO 50/50. Chance of -some- form of life existing elsewhere? IMO 100%. Chances of me being alive when it happens? IMO 1% and then only if it originated within our solar system.
When I'm at the bookstore I usually have multiple titles I'm trying to choose from. Now I won't have so many. Much easier. I'll just refuse to buy any book from this publisher.
Re:Kinda gives a new meaning to '1337 hAx0r2'.
on
Ready, Aim, HACK!
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The beauty of the sniper rig is that you're not SUPPOSED to be -seen-.
Besides, if you can do this with a sniper rifle, you can do it with gear that looks like a telephoto rig. While it won't look less suspicious, it will appear less malicious.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember ... Sun didn't write the original article, nor the article on /. Sun's image is regularly damaged by mistatements like this and the negative opinions they generate.
... probably 99%) of the pieces of the Java Desktop System are Open Source, that as a whole it is not since there are some small proprietary pieces (a small bit from SuSE since we OEM their distro and an even smaller amount that enables communication between the desktop clients and the management servers).
... 99% Open Source but not Open Source itself.
... why is it that that is so easily forgetten just because Sun chooses to not make every last line of code in commercial products open? The contributions are still just as valid ... ) and deserves better than to get trounced every time some journalist shows their ignorance.
... it does say that about the Desktop (and it is more true about the Desktop).
... I'm just pointing out the reality that Sun's employees are not as daft as you seem to imply.
As someone who works for Sun I'll just say that as with -any- reasonably large company there are people who don't understand the distinctions between "available source code" and "Open Source".
However, a large number do. And many software sales people you might speak to would realize that while many (most
Most will also understand that OpenOffice is Open Source and that StarOffice is the same as JDS in this respect
Java is obviously a similar situation.
I'm not saying everyone at Sun "gets it", and even when they "get it" sometimes the spirit is lost (I get as tired as you of hearing someone say "but the source code is available" when told that X is not Open Sourced). However your post goes beyond an honest admission and implies a generality that is not true. And Sun most definitely contribute enough to the Open Source arena (pet peeve
BTW, I don't see in the article where it said Sun's "runtime" was Open Source
NOTE: I'm not saying any of the above is the right or wrong way for Sun to license things
Assuming you have rights to install GmailFS on any of those linux machines. Somehow I don't see this making it into a mainstream distro.
There has been a good SuSE (actually in this case Java Desktop System) Linux business laptop that "just works" out for 9 months now. The Tadpole Talin 15". The also now have the 12 inch screen model available.
... but then again HP's brandname hasn't been that great for awhile now anyway.
... just pointing out some other alternatives.
Not as big a brand name as HP
The Tadpole machines may be more expensive (no way for me to know, I got my Talin 15 as a demo box and their website doesn't say) so I'm not saying you should definitely get this one over the HP box if that is a concern
Things in this respect are definitely improving.
If I was counting fingers it would have been 24 (though only 20 not counting thumbs), not 12.
These only address the bugs/glitches in NWN. NWN, while a very good engine in many ways, is extremely lacking in D&D human experience.
I would really like to see NWN2's engine allow for voice chat and webcams. Sure, you could run these things on the side but alot of people don't have 2 computers and these would need to be run simultaneously.
Fuck this country.
... no way could I get through the US population in my lifetime. However this does work good as a blanket statement for the following.
... well ... at least Strom Thurmond is gone.
... yeesh, have you SEEN those people? Oh wait, I said that about the Senate ... ok, so I'd take this category over that one.
:P
You're kidding, right? I've been with 12 people in my life
Fuck the President.
No. No no no.
Fuck your mom.
My Oedipal complex went away when I was 13, thanks
Fuck you.
That one's easy but not so much fun.
Fuck your friends
If I can pick and choose, gladly. Otherwise I'd have to say no.
fuck the Senate
Have you SEEN those people
fuck the House
Ok, so maybe there are a couple in there.
fuck all goverment employees.
Only if I can start at the interstate tollbooth, there's usually a couple hotties there. If I have to start at the DMV
Oh, and fuck you too
But Hypertransport, which is a large part of what makes the Opteron/Athlon64 perform so well under load, was from a technology used for DEC Alpha buses.
Not dying, but definitely beginning to flounder. DirecTV is most likely going to switch to a homegrown box in the next year or two. TiVo has no other deals (at least none that are public yet) with large providers and that is really what would keep their current business afloat for the long-haul.
I still have hopes that they'll make a digital cable version of their HDTiVo and that then they'll be able to ink some serious deals. However if that doesn't happen they are in serious trouble in the not too distant future. Between Moxi, NDS (the DVR that DirecTV will begin using next year in conjunction with TiVo boxes if rumors are true), embedded players like MontaVista (who don't sell anything direct but have been working with Japanese DVR manufacturers) and various knock-offs and cheap (cheap being good in the mass-market STB world even at the expense of features).
Perhaps TiVo will cut out a new niche, but it will be alot harder to do that with something other than TV since that is what 99% of the consumers think of when they think entertainment.
That's what I thought before reading the links, but if you look at the diagram in the first article link it would appear that that water is not returned (directly) to the lake. It is used for city water. So any damage done to the lake is already being done today (siphoning off of water)
That city water would be heated anyway in the process of usage. So the heat added to the air or lake are both negligible. And in fact the heat generated by air conditioning units would likely be siginificantly higher.
Also, if there is a 75% reduction in power costs used to chill those buildings, then the heat used to generate that 75% power is also reduced. It may not be local to the lake area but still a Good Thing overall. Very similar to using geothermal heat in the winter.
Plain and simply I will never buy online music until I can get lossless CD quality recordings for less than I can buy a physical CD.
... but I'll be able to listen to my lossless version on my home system and I'll be able to reencode if a better format comes out in the future.
I understand DRM and don't have a big issue with it when it comes down to it (I don't -like- it but as long as it gives me my fair use I'll live with it).
I'm simply not willing to pay for lossy encodings. I would rather pay $9.99 for an album that is CD quality than $4.99 for a lossy encoded version. I would prefer it to be like FLAC where it is a compressed file, but nothing less than CD quality. CD is the -minimum- I am looking for. However I should be able to buy for $4.99 + a small added bandwith charge.
Will I rip down to a smaller format for my portable player? Sure
Until then, since I buy less than 1 disc a month, I'll stick with hardcopy.
Read a few posts above yours and you'll find at least one who says that.
...
They didn't cite any proof though.
Hence your parent's question.
You asked
If you mean distributing the entire game in source form, I strongly disagree.
High profile games like NWN and Doom3 usually are brought to market with significant new technology. Even a source obscuration is not going to prevent a decent programmer from reverse engineering how you did fancy whizbang things #2.
Many companies make a large chunk of their money by releasing a game with only a moderate storyline but a bunch of new engine features, and then license their engine (id being the most successful at this). At the same time, many of these companies (again, id being best at it) do not seem that interested in software patents and often will release hooks and eventually entire code chunks when they have moved to a new game. It does not make any sense for them to hand out the source code to their games with this model being successful for all involved (except people installing on Linux).
In an ideal world where everyone obeyed not just the law but it's spirit in regards to copyrighted source code, full source distribution would work. We don't live in that world.
If you mean that the installer should be distributed in source format, that I most definitely can see. However, I think I would prefer to see installers done in Java so that you could have a single installer on all platforms. The -game- doesn't need to be in Java, just the installer. Perhaps also distribute the installer's Java source.
However none of the above addresses library incompatibilities/dependencies. Yes, the idea of distributing the entire game in source code -would- do that but I just don't see that being viable for the gaming market even with a restrictive license. Static binaries would help, though they would be huge. In the end the "right" answer is still to have a solid LSB standard (ie, freeze a branch and know that ISVs will not adopt a new one for at least 2-3 years) and for users to require their distributions to fully support a common LSB standard. We have gotten close (and less close) over the last couple of years but it still seems that this is not to the place we as users need it to be.
I for one welcome our new genetically enhanced lazy beer drinking game playing Overlords.
Doesn't seem like a fair comparison to me for 2 reasons:
... Windows 3.x was almost purely a desktop with some small chunk of the workgroup server space. This didn't change until Windows NT (yes, NT shared the 3.1 version but was extremely different). And Windows NT didn't start eating into the SMB server market significantly until NT 4.0, which was LONG after the Unix Wars has ended.
1) The "Unix Wars" of the late 80's / early 90's were primarily due to various vendors trying to lock people in. See this article as one example. In fact it was this very action that many analysts say opened the door for Microsoft to succeed in moving into the market with Windows NT.
2) [hinted at above] Microsoft was not competing in the same market as Unix or mainframes with Windows 3.0
Well crap ... I spent about an hour one day paging through /. on a WAP phone without using the /palm version ... oh the time I could have saved.
Then again it was at an airport and wasting time was the main reason I was using WAP in the first place, so maybe it served the purpose.
Used to happen with IBM mainframes, then Windows, and now, regrettably, with Unix variants.
... vendor lock-in was happening with Unix LONG before Windows was a viable competitor.
Oh come now
Or we're playing a cosmic game of catch-up.
Posit that in a few years/decades we may have discovered yet another communication method that is better than radio/laser/etc. And another few decades or centuries later something else comes along.
If other technological cultures (note: we're assuming alot in assuming that another culture would embrace tech in the same manner as we have) follow a similar pattern, we have a very very tiny window to catch the signal. Compound that with need to have the signal's origination coincide perfectly with the time it needs to travel to us during a time when we have the right technology level to understand that it is a signal.
I love the idea of SETI, but overall I find it extremely unlikely it will be successful while we are so relatively primitive. I believe that technological evolution will progress to the point where there is a "best" method of communication and if other cultures progress technologically that we will all end up at the same point and possibly be able to discover each other, but I doubt we are anywhere near that level and perhaps no one else is either.
Sure, but let us expound to an equivalent.
... the show is "Happy Days: The Cunninghams", a sequel/prequel about Howard Cunningham's parents in the year 1923. Enter a 65+ year old fat Arthur Fonzarelli, who has been resurrected after being killed in the 7th iteration of "Happy Days: Generations", brought in to revive "The Cunninghams" to water ski over a shark for a second time after previous episodes destroyed the timeline so that the first jumping of the shark will have never -really- happened without this 2-part guest appearance.
... no. Crossovers are one thing. Shatner on Enterprise is just silly. My TiVo just lost a season pass.
The year is 2009 (corresponds with the start date of both shows)
Umm
I actually like these kind of outlandish irrelivent stories, must be a slow news day... :)
Oh man, then you need this!
Welcome to /.
/. wouldn't exist if it didn't bring OSDN revenue (at least not as an OSDN product). That revenue comes from ads. If you were to look at the computing product ads that appear, I would say more seem to be featuring AMD boxes than not (example, the Sun ad for AMD Opteron servers flashed in front of my eyes not long ago).
/. ads wouldn't get viewed if people didn't come here to read articles. AMD seems to be the x86 processor brand of choice for alot of readers (partially due to the point in #3 to follow) and so it only makes sense to have a bias towards what so many readers want.
/. have a fairly counter-culture bent to them (at least counter to the culture of a couple of years ago :). AMD is the counter-culture answer to Intel for x86 chips.
... welcome to /. ... where no one ever said life was going to be unbiased or even fair.
That isn't sarcasm, that's the truth. You either haven't been here long or have somehow missed the AMD bias.
1)
2) The
3) Even without ads and without readers, the people who started and maintain
4) The poster submitted the story, not the mods, so the quote show the poster's bias. Note that by accepting it the mods have accepted a link to a site that shows AMD as -losing- this benchmark. I can say from my experience that mods only edit submissions if there is something like a bad link. Bad grammar and opinionation are always retained if the submission is accepted.
So
The evaluation requires multiple points before you can determine worth:
... $500/year
... $500/year ... that net meaning that it paid for the energy lost through it and had dividend above that mark (ok, so extremely drastic)
... that ecological costing is actually fairly complex and is why the public often doesn't "get it". Maybe we need to go to the utility model for things such as this as well. That is only partial sarcasm, BTW, it could actually make a lot of sense to figure out a model whereby such things could be scaled out over time so that the initial aquisition was not prohibitive.
1) How much does it cost to produce a square foot of this solar panel?
2) Same question as #1 for the glass that would be used normally?
3) How much energy will this solar panel -leak- over the expected life span of the installation?
4) Same as #3 for regular glass?
5) What is the energy gained by the solar collection process?
6) After all factors considered, is the cost of the solar panel compared to regular glass over the lifespan of both higher (bad) or lower (good)?
Illustration (all assumptions):
* Assume the installation has an expected life span of 10 years (I would hope the lifespan of skyscraper glass would be more like 40-50 years or more, but that is a pain to calculate).
* Assume that the glass installation costs $1,000 (we're talking a big piece of skyscraper glass here, ok?)
* Assume solar panel costs 10x the normal glass installation, $10,000
* Assume that each year the regular glass will cost 1/2 again the initial cost in energy loss (probably a pretty drastic assumption but it makes things easy)
* Assume that each year the solar glass will net 1/2 again the initial cost of -regular- glass each year (another drastic assumption)
Factored together, after 10 years the regular glass net cost was $6,000 whereas the solar glass net cost was $5,000 (and also helped subsidize the cost, making future installations less costly).
Of course, being assumptions you could easily make an example where the reverse was true and the solar glass was more expensive over 10 years (again, hoping that 10 years is a small chunk of the real installation).
My point is pretty small for all of the above
I would answer with Yes and No.
... that damned Panasonic 2.4GHz phone was the pits for wireless ... it would knock out not just my internal 802.11b but my directional 802.11b wireless ISP connection (the antenna was on the ROOF and on the outside of the HOUSE pointed AWAY from the phone's base and the Panasonic could kill it from the opposite side of the house). Whenever we would get a call I would have to answer it and hit the "channel" button
... my Siemens gear does not interfere with anything. I've owned 2 different Gigaset base stations (first one got water damage from a snow storm) with 4 phones placed around the house and I can be on 2 different lines with handsets and have no trouble with either 802.11b network.
YES
We have a sincere suspicion that my neighbor grabbed the phone from the trash or bought an identical model since when they get calls my net connection gets very fuzzy (but not gone).
No
The Siemens gear is fairly expensive ($300 for the base I think and about $100 per handset) but if you work at home and require 802.11b it is a worthwhile contender.
It is not that the technology isn't yet good enough to detect small planets ... it is more severe than that. The technology we are using to detect planets specifically is geared towards finding the large gas giants.
If you do a grep for the wrong pattern, you're not going to find the pattern you are looking for.
Additionally, we can only scan a small chunk of the galaxy, much less the universe as a whole.
Probability is still WAY on the side of other earthlike or at least life sustaining planets existing. Hell, we are finding life in so MANY places that we thought were uninhabitable that it probably can form in any environment with liquid water and a sustainable energy source.
That only covers a small chunk of what we are secretly hoping/dreading finding. Next we would want to find not just a planet, not just life, but intelligent life. Given how intelligence probably evolved in people, we will need to find a massive amount of life before finding intelligence.
Then to find civilization of some form that intelligence has to survive into the maturing process (a point we haven't passed yet ourselves) or we have to get lucky enough to find it before it dies off (and before we die off).
Chances of anyone from Earth ever seeing an alien culture? Pretty slim, but a large part of that is the question of our ultimate survival. Chances of civilization existing at some point somewhere in the universe? IMO 50/50. Chance of -some- form of life existing elsewhere? IMO 100%. Chances of me being alive when it happens? IMO 1% and then only if it originated within our solar system.
When I'm at the bookstore I usually have multiple titles I'm trying to choose from. Now I won't have so many. Much easier. I'll just refuse to buy any book from this publisher.
The beauty of the sniper rig is that you're not SUPPOSED to be -seen-.
Besides, if you can do this with a sniper rifle, you can do it with gear that looks like a telephoto rig. While it won't look less suspicious, it will appear less malicious.