Since you bought up the open source / closed source fight, if you want customization that Misterhouse might be good. You can then submit patches and updates for the project (it seems it's still sometimes updated, last time in 2008)
For cheap & crude, an IR transceiver (homebuilt), a few X10 controllers (ebay them, cheapest way), and an old box can be great. I ran heyu for the x10 stuff and lirc for the transceiver. Had an audio card with a few different outputs, so ended up scripting the remote to turn on and off audio outputs. An X10 plug would turn on and off physical components.
It isn't the end all and be all, but my system controls audio and lights in my main room. Could have easily tied in MythTV as well, if I wanted to. Never played with climate control, since I live in an apartment.
Sometimes crude is "good enough". And if isn't good enough, it may help you decide what you want in a better system. For example, the only thing I desired was a remote blinds control for my window.
For cost, I used my main PC ($0), a home built transciever ($20 in parts, if that?), and a few X10 controllers ($10 each on ebay).
After a certain point though, you end up with either very simple molecules or just crap like lead that you can't break down any more. A lot of effort went into gathering up some of the component materials and concentrating them together for whatever reason. Aside from reburying stuff in the ground (which if you think about it, is exactly what half the cleanup proposals are!) there isn't much that can be done with matter in such a simplified form.
But that lead had to come somewhere.
Outside of a few rare exceptions, mankind mines materials, we don't transmute them from other materials.
Why can't we simply rebury the material where it came from? Or recycle it?
There is mining that still goes through large amounts of material. We could use the waste material from those mining operations to dillute the toxic elements down to their background levels, then rebury it.
It may not be politically feasible, but is there any reason why it isn't scientifically feasible?
I too have a vision. It involves electricity becoming mondo-expensive and people switching to energy saving devices en-masse. Governments around the world turning to nuclear, and where convenient, hydro and air power, not because they have low carbon emissions (that's only a plus), but because they are actually cheaper! People finally turning away from 1800's oil and coal based technologies and moving, triumphantly towards 1950's engineering solutions!!
Energy being more expensive might not be a good thing for the environment.
Consider California. If energy is cheap, desalinization is more attractive. If energy is expensive, diverting major rivers from original watersheds is more attractive.
Often, raping the environment doesn't take a lot of energy. Environmentally friendly practices tend to take more energy.
Full of artificial, decorative use of language, presenting trivial details as meaningful by using way too many words to describe them, expressing unoriginal, standardized opinions in a supposedly creative way.
What is "The reason I turn off NPR?"
(Not normally a bad radio station, but damn, the slice of life observations they occasionally have are annoying as hell.)
If someone was weaving all over the road while trying to shave, we wouldn't ask for a law against shaving-while-driving to be passed.
Instead we would charge that individual with some existing law against negligent driving.
Give the person a ticket. If he or she contests it, proving that the driver was weaving shouldn't be hard in this day of police vehicles with front-dash cameras. Problem solved.
Why not enforce the existing laws instead of allowing politicians to pat themselves on the back for passing a popular law that is redundant?
I think TV and movies really adds to this problem too. Name one TV show where the family lives in a house or an apartment realistic for what the income level for their job should be. They aren't given this misinformation only through school, but outside of it through mainstream entertainment.
Perhaps "My Name is Earl" (now cancelled) shows this?
One character works in a bar, lives in a trailer house (in a trailer park) with his wife and two children, and drives a crappy car.
Maybe "Scrubs"? Young residents/doctors, presumably still paying off massive loans, living with roommates. (Although I suspect that a large part of that is more of a plot device for increased character interaction.)
Other than that show, nothing springs to mind, unless we are talking about shows about the upper class.
That's right, ooh scary - GMO's are a bit scary. No human safety tests were done - ever. Were all just supposed to trust the warm an fuzzy Monsanto would never sell us anything bad. It's just the company who made agent orange.
Now that studies are being done, GMO's are shown to cause increased allergenicity, as well as other problems:
I wonder if polyploidal forms of food would also show increased allergenicity.
While "normal" creatures might have a pair of chromosomes (two sets), many plant species (both wild and domestic) have more than that -- seedless bananas, for example, have three sets of chromosomes, and some wheat has up six sets of chromosomes (three pairs) and sugar cane can have up to eight sets (four pairs).
Not only does this occur naturally, but it's possible to force it to happen through treating cells with certain chemicals. This is one of the ways to create new strains of crops
With the increase in genes in polyploids, one would suspect that they'd have an increase in the proteins that cause allergic reactions.
Yes, but the environmental mark was, on average, a lot smaller than modern living. The Australian Aborigines had a way of life that was essentially unchanged for tens of thousands of years. The lifestyle consisted of finding water sources, hunting for food, and collecting wild growing berries and fruits from the land (not farming). Everything that they constructed was made from wood and other natural, biodegradable materials, from completely renewable and sustainable sources. Without intervention, they would probably have continued their lifestyle for tens of thousands of more years.
From wikipedia: "There was considerable innovation occurring within Aborginal technology in the last 3000 years prior to colonisation. Quartz was used as a substitute for chert and was being worked by indigenous craftsmen. The dingo was brought from southern Asia. Small scale agricultural developments occurred with eel farming in western Victoria and yam planting e.g. in Geraldton"
Just because they didn't reach the same technological heights as Europeans did at first contact doesn't mean that the aboriginies sat around doing the exact same thing their great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great Grandpa did.
We also probably didn't see the cultural attributes that did not survive because they weren't sustainable. And we didn't see the outcome of the unsustainable practices that were around when Europeans arrived -- disease and violence came first.
Execution rate inversely proportional to homicide rate? Interesting correlation...
If that is true, I have a possible explanation:
Justice systems that are more focused on punishment will be more prone to execute criminals.
Justice systems that are more focused on rehabilitation will be less prone to execute criminals.
A focus on rehabilitation is probably correlated with other social programs designed to reduce poverty and other factors that lead to criminal behaviors.
Or it could be that more violent crimes result in a call for more use of the death penalty.
Is to try to overrule the verdict of the scientific community because they don't like what it says. The climate change battle is over, and it is now a conclusive scientific consensus that it is happening and that human action is contributing to it. We need to slash our emissions dramatically, these guys just want other people to do it.
Don't forget the other side of the coin: Those who advocate that something must be done for climate change don't like what the alternatives say.
It's nice to blame global warming for the decline in the diversity of species and more destructive storms. It isn't so nice to blame average Joe Public citizen for habitat loss and fragmentation. It isn't so nice to criticize Joe Public citizen for living somewhere where wildfires or flooding is a regular occurance. Instead we try to mitigate the problem by stopping smaller fires before they spread, and building flood control structures - this works for smaller fires and floods, but creates a situation that will eventually result in one large catastrophe. We destroy coastal wetlands that reduce the severity of hurricanes, build houses on the coast and in low areas, and then blame global warming for the resulting disaster. In many areas, periodic fires and floods have been occuring for long before the industrial revolution. Some of the best farmland in the country is the result of rivers overflowing their banks and depositing rich silt. Some plants have lifecycles that rely on periodic wildfires. When we stop fires and floods, we are interferring with nature.
Changing our lifestyles is hard. Telling someone else to change is easy. We'd rather tell big business to sell us more fuel efficient vehicles (and then buy SUVs because they are "safer", or live an hour away from work in a autocentric suburb) instead of making the lifestyle changes that reduce our ecological footprint. We build cities in the desert, vast metro regions, and divert rivers across states to water them, and then blame global warming when we don't have enough water. We've turned the entire Midwest and Great Plains regions into one giant farm. Great for the wildlife that can adapt (deer, for example), bad for the rest.
I'm all for reducing the amount of greenhouse gasses we produce. But we need to be honest with ourselves about what it will take to reduce the rate of extinctions, and we need to be honest with ourselves about which areas can support large numbers of people without subjecting them to periodic catastrophies.
I don't understand the modern viewpoint that cars are evil, and their usage should be discouraged. They are simply an update of the classic horse-and-cart that humans have used for 10,000 years, and the reason humans used these carts was because they were great for carrying lots of stuff.
I don't think cars are evil.
I do think that in the US, our reliance on automobiles have contributed to very automobile-centric designs which include urban sprawl (with all of its ills) and a very automobile-centric design that discourages other forms of transportation.
I'm also partial to the argument that automobiles probably increase a sense of community isolation (driving through your neighborhood at 25-30 mph is a lot different experience than walking through it at 3 mph) and decreases upward mobility for the very poor (due to needing an automobile in many areas to reliably get to work on time).
Don't believe me? Well I just bought almost a month's worth of groceries. Try carrying 20 bags onto the local subway or bus or walk home. I think I'll keep my horseless cart. Thanks.
That's what a cab is foor. Since you bought almost a month's worth of groceries, you should only need to pay the fair once every few weeks.
Or you could be like other people and go to the grocery store every few days. If you enjoy consuming fresh produce, odds are you are visiting the grocery store regularly.
Why don't you spend a winter in Chicago and then get back to this conversation. I live where there is similar weather and we're advised not to spend more than a few minutes outdoors because of frostbite. Walking around in twenty below temps is horrible. But life can't stop because of snow, ice, wind, and sub zero temps, so you have to go out. You should at least be safe when doing so.
Unless Chicago is worse than Minneapolis (I doubt it), there's not many days where it is twenty below. There are probably not many days where the high is below 0.
As for the cold, the reason you're being advised not to spend more than a few minutes outdoors is because many commuters seem to confuse clothing appropriate for a 68 degree office with clothing appropriate for weather in the single digits and teens.
Dress appropriately and you can walk an hour in 0-degree weather without frostbite.
In my experience, it is the first "real" broken heart that hurts the worst.
But each of the next ones gets less and less.
I'm not sure if this is due to emotional scar tissue building up, or if I don't let myself entirely commit to the idea anymore, but it gets easier with time.
But the first one... Damn, it does hurt. And it takes a long time to heal, if it ever does...
The problem might be solved, but there still is a lingering mystery. Did Fermat have a proof by elementary methods? Does such a proof exist? But I suppose that since there is A proof, the impetus to find another one is mostly gone.
There's a great passing mention of Fermat's last theorem in the book "The Light of other Days".
In the book, a device allows one to see the past. Someone looks at old Fermat, and discovers he did possess a simple and elegant proof.
That proof ends up spawning an entire new field of mathmatics.;)
just rank candidates in the order you like them. then, in a divisive election is an opportunity for everyone's second best choice to become the winner rather than partisan first choices, that one half of the population hates, barely edging out the other
Does the population as a whole benefit from a borda or approval voting system?
Under the current system, we are forced to compromise with our candidates quite early. It may result in a more mainstream choice in politicians.
Even for power users, HTPC's can be aggravating. Why, in a world where you could put together a tiny monster PC for around $300 would someone buy a MivX or NMT player? Simple. Take any HTPC on the market, ANY.
Plug it into a regular, yellow, composite television.
Plug it into an HDTV via component or HDMI.
If you can turn it on, boot it up, and play a video on it without a single configuration edit without any hassle from installation, then please, reply to this topic because as far as I know, an HTPC that does this is akin to a fucking unicorn.
For a DVR-replacement, an off-the-shelf HTPC may be more cost effective for the majority of people.
I'd rather do more things with my HTPC. For example, play emulated games. Which off-the-shelf HTPCs tend to not be able to do.
The Grand Slam used 4,144 kg of explosives (Torpex)which is considerably more than the heavier bomb proposed by the US DoD with an earth penetration design depth of 40m. I would imagine that the higher impact speed of the US bomb requires a much stronger casing, but I am surprised at the small ordinance load.
Guidance systems have been much improved since WWII.
More precise targetting results in a smaller payload needed.
The GP mentioned bicycles, I used to ride one untill I took a nasty spill on the way to work. I imagine a segway would be quite a bit safer than a bicycle. I'm looking forward to when they're affordable.
Considering that the top speed on a Segway is 12 mph, and a top speed on a bicycle for a reasonable fit rider is far higher, I'd imagine that the Segway would be safer because of that.
Many electric providers charge a base "connection" fee to all customers to cover the costs of maintaining the connection, billing, etc. Power is charged on top of that. Nothing in the article says it will only be charged to customers with solar panels, so I assume this is just following what other providers already do.
I once saw an electric bill for a commercial garage. The main draw in the summer was the occasional light.
The various usage fees and surcharges made up the majority of the bill.
Wow! Your first link makes the "Breeder Reactor" sound just so wonderful.
Unfortunately you omitted to mention that it still produces a waste that is beyond lethal for 25,000 years.
If you care to bring the facts to bear about nuclear energy, mainly what do we now do with the waste as well as the spent facility when all's said and done with... for the next 25,000 years! The only answer anyone can give, a stupid blank look and shrug, will only indicate complete incompetence and a lack of thinking this one through, so don't bother.
Why do you consider the waste that a breeder reactor produces to be an insurmountable problem?
The ores that were fed into the reactor stayed radioactive for billions of years.
Yet the presence of naturally radioactive substances on earth didn't manage to kill us all.
Can we dispose of a small amount of highly radioactive waste in such a way that is unlikely to harm anyone?
It seems likely. There are several promising methods, the debate is what method to use. For example, check out seabed burial of glassified nuclear waste.
Slashdot Mirror
Repeat after me:
There is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world.
China getting richer doesn't automatically mean that the US gets poorer.
Distance may be a problem, or time constraints.
But hauling around computers and tools is trivial with the right bicycle setup. :p
Since you bought up the open source / closed source fight, if you want customization that Misterhouse might be good. You can then submit patches and updates for the project (it seems it's still sometimes updated, last time in 2008)
For cheap & crude, an IR transceiver (homebuilt), a few X10 controllers (ebay them, cheapest way), and an old box can be great. I ran heyu for the x10 stuff and lirc for the transceiver. Had an audio card with a few different outputs, so ended up scripting the remote to turn on and off audio outputs. An X10 plug would turn on and off physical components.
It isn't the end all and be all, but my system controls audio and lights in my main room. Could have easily tied in MythTV as well, if I wanted to. Never played with climate control, since I live in an apartment.
Sometimes crude is "good enough". And if isn't good enough, it may help you decide what you want in a better system. For example, the only thing I desired was a remote blinds control for my window.
For cost, I used my main PC ($0), a home built transciever ($20 in parts, if that?), and a few X10 controllers ($10 each on ebay).
I like microbes better: http://www.giantmicrobes.com/
But that lead had to come somewhere.
Outside of a few rare exceptions, mankind mines materials, we don't transmute them from other materials.
Why can't we simply rebury the material where it came from? Or recycle it?
There is mining that still goes through large amounts of material. We could use the waste material from those mining operations to dillute the toxic elements down to their background levels, then rebury it.
It may not be politically feasible, but is there any reason why it isn't scientifically feasible?
New sources of radiation scares people to an irrational degree.
Look at the amount of people living in areas where radon is likely. They still object to a nuclear power plant.
Energy being more expensive might not be a good thing for the environment.
Consider California. If energy is cheap, desalinization is more attractive. If energy is expensive, diverting major rivers from original watersheds is more attractive.
Often, raping the environment doesn't take a lot of energy. Environmentally friendly practices tend to take more energy.
What is "The reason I turn off NPR?"
(Not normally a bad radio station, but damn, the slice of life observations they occasionally have are annoying as hell.)
If someone was weaving all over the road while trying to shave, we wouldn't ask for a law against shaving-while-driving to be passed.
Instead we would charge that individual with some existing law against negligent driving.
Give the person a ticket. If he or she contests it, proving that the driver was weaving shouldn't be hard in this day of police vehicles with front-dash cameras. Problem solved.
Why not enforce the existing laws instead of allowing politicians to pat themselves on the back for passing a popular law that is redundant?
Perhaps "My Name is Earl" (now cancelled) shows this?
One character works in a bar, lives in a trailer house (in a trailer park) with his wife and two children, and drives a crappy car.
Maybe "Scrubs"? Young residents/doctors, presumably still paying off massive loans, living with roommates. (Although I suspect that a large part of that is more of a plot device for increased character interaction.)
Other than that show, nothing springs to mind, unless we are talking about shows about the upper class.
I wonder if polyploidal forms of food would also show increased allergenicity.
While "normal" creatures might have a pair of chromosomes (two sets), many plant species (both wild and domestic) have more than that -- seedless bananas, for example, have three sets of chromosomes, and some wheat has up six sets of chromosomes (three pairs) and sugar cane can have up to eight sets (four pairs).
Not only does this occur naturally, but it's possible to force it to happen through treating cells with certain chemicals. This is one of the ways to create new strains of crops
With the increase in genes in polyploids, one would suspect that they'd have an increase in the proteins that cause allergic reactions.
From wikipedia: "There was considerable innovation occurring within Aborginal technology in the last 3000 years prior to colonisation. Quartz was used as a substitute for chert and was being worked by indigenous craftsmen. The dingo was brought from southern Asia. Small scale agricultural developments occurred with eel farming in western Victoria and yam planting e.g. in Geraldton"
Just because they didn't reach the same technological heights as Europeans did at first contact doesn't mean that the aboriginies sat around doing the exact same thing their great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great Grandpa did.
We also probably didn't see the cultural attributes that did not survive because they weren't sustainable. And we didn't see the outcome of the unsustainable practices that were around when Europeans arrived -- disease and violence came first.
If that is true, I have a possible explanation:
Justice systems that are more focused on punishment will be more prone to execute criminals.
Justice systems that are more focused on rehabilitation will be less prone to execute criminals.
A focus on rehabilitation is probably correlated with other social programs designed to reduce poverty and other factors that lead to criminal behaviors.
Or it could be that more violent crimes result in a call for more use of the death penalty.
Don't forget the other side of the coin: Those who advocate that something must be done for climate change don't like what the alternatives say.
It's nice to blame global warming for the decline in the diversity of species and more destructive storms. It isn't so nice to blame average Joe Public citizen for habitat loss and fragmentation. It isn't so nice to criticize Joe Public citizen for living somewhere where wildfires or flooding is a regular occurance. Instead we try to mitigate the problem by stopping smaller fires before they spread, and building flood control structures - this works for smaller fires and floods, but creates a situation that will eventually result in one large catastrophe. We destroy coastal wetlands that reduce the severity of hurricanes, build houses on the coast and in low areas, and then blame global warming for the resulting disaster. In many areas, periodic fires and floods have been occuring for long before the industrial revolution. Some of the best farmland in the country is the result of rivers overflowing their banks and depositing rich silt. Some plants have lifecycles that rely on periodic wildfires. When we stop fires and floods, we are interferring with nature.
Changing our lifestyles is hard. Telling someone else to change is easy. We'd rather tell big business to sell us more fuel efficient vehicles (and then buy SUVs because they are "safer", or live an hour away from work in a autocentric suburb) instead of making the lifestyle changes that reduce our ecological footprint. We build cities in the desert, vast metro regions, and divert rivers across states to water them, and then blame global warming when we don't have enough water. We've turned the entire Midwest and Great Plains regions into one giant farm. Great for the wildlife that can adapt (deer, for example), bad for the rest.
I'm all for reducing the amount of greenhouse gasses we produce. But we need to be honest with ourselves about what it will take to reduce the rate of extinctions, and we need to be honest with ourselves about which areas can support large numbers of people without subjecting them to periodic catastrophies.
I don't think cars are evil.
I do think that in the US, our reliance on automobiles have contributed to very automobile-centric designs which include urban sprawl (with all of its ills) and a very automobile-centric design that discourages other forms of transportation.
I'm also partial to the argument that automobiles probably increase a sense of community isolation (driving through your neighborhood at 25-30 mph is a lot different experience than walking through it at 3 mph) and decreases upward mobility for the very poor (due to needing an automobile in many areas to reliably get to work on time).
That's what a cab is foor. Since you bought almost a month's worth of groceries, you should only need to pay the fair once every few weeks.
Or you could be like other people and go to the grocery store every few days. If you enjoy consuming fresh produce, odds are you are visiting the grocery store regularly.
Unless Chicago is worse than Minneapolis (I doubt it), there's not many days where it is twenty below. There are probably not many days where the high is below 0.
As for the cold, the reason you're being advised not to spend more than a few minutes outdoors is because many commuters seem to confuse clothing appropriate for a 68 degree office with clothing appropriate for weather in the single digits and teens.
Dress appropriately and you can walk an hour in 0-degree weather without frostbite.
In my experience, it is the first "real" broken heart that hurts the worst.
But each of the next ones gets less and less.
I'm not sure if this is due to emotional scar tissue building up, or if I don't let myself entirely commit to the idea anymore, but it gets easier with time.
But the first one... Damn, it does hurt. And it takes a long time to heal, if it ever does...
There's a great passing mention of Fermat's last theorem in the book "The Light of other Days".
In the book, a device allows one to see the past. Someone looks at old Fermat, and discovers he did possess a simple and elegant proof.
That proof ends up spawning an entire new field of mathmatics. ;)
$20: Walmart prepaid cell.
$200: 2 x $100 Prepaid card (2000 minutes total).
$220 total, for 2000 minutes. That's less than $20/month. Not too shabby.
Does the population as a whole benefit from a borda or approval voting system?
Under the current system, we are forced to compromise with our candidates quite early. It may result in a more mainstream choice in politicians.
That may or may not be a good thing.
For a DVR-replacement, an off-the-shelf HTPC may be more cost effective for the majority of people.
I'd rather do more things with my HTPC. For example, play emulated games. Which off-the-shelf HTPCs tend to not be able to do.
Guidance systems have been much improved since WWII.
More precise targetting results in a smaller payload needed.
Considering that the top speed on a Segway is 12 mph, and a top speed on a bicycle for a reasonable fit rider is far higher, I'd imagine that the Segway would be safer because of that.
I once saw an electric bill for a commercial garage. The main draw in the summer was the occasional light.
The various usage fees and surcharges made up the majority of the bill.
Why do you consider the waste that a breeder reactor produces to be an insurmountable problem?
The ores that were fed into the reactor stayed radioactive for billions of years.
Yet the presence of naturally radioactive substances on earth didn't manage to kill us all.
Can we dispose of a small amount of highly radioactive waste in such a way that is unlikely to harm anyone?
It seems likely. There are several promising methods, the debate is what method to use. For example, check out seabed burial of glassified nuclear waste.