Last I checked, Nanosolar's output was entirely spoken for by large utility installations for the next 12 months of production at least. However, their CEO did say this recently:
"Update 4/30: Thank you for the hundreds of comments we have received to this posting via email. Our team has read and digested every single of them. To those of you who are disappointed that our first product is not for residential homeowners, we can reassure you that we do have a fabulous residential solution on our near-term roadmap -- one that will bring the utility scale economics of Nanosolar Utility Panel technology to homes everywhere, and completely redefine how residential solar is done."
So perhaps they'll release a consumer product sooner than I think; let's hope!
I have a catch-all address at my personal domain so I can create one-time addresses for each company I do business with. It's easy to see which addresses leak out that way. Three things I've found:
A surprising number of addresses are taken from private "we will never sell your information" lists (never published anywhere on the interweb). The companies I have contacted about this have always refused to believe that their email lists are involved; perhaps stolen by an ex-employee? I'm not sure.
Second, much of my "spam" (50%?) is actually bounces where my domain was used as the From: header in the email. Luckily this is easy to detect and delete automatically. (Procmail's ^FROM_MAILER contruct is quite nice.)
Third, by now most of the other half of my daily spam is to email addresses at my domain that I have NEVER used -- they're made up. I can only assume that some spammer is indeed trying all the common names at a domain in the hopes of getting through. Luckily procmail and SpamAssassin block all that, but I can guarantee to you that it's happening. If it's not a "dictionary attack", what would you call it?
As I said in a previous post, Zipcar only requires you to be 21, and we're working to lower that age to 18, if you're affiliated with a participating college or univerity. You can find out a bit more on our web site, or check to see if your school has a special deal: http://www.zipcar.com/join/
Disclaimer: I work for Zipcar.
Re:What about true urban young adults?
on
Time Sharing Cars
·
· Score: 1
With Zipcar at least, we only require that you've held a driver's license for 3 years (you don't technically need much, if any, driving experience). We're also working on partnerships with colleges and universities to lower the membership age to 18. You're absolutely right, the urban young adult is a great market for us, which is why we're trying our best to sign them up.
Actually, we only require you to fill up the car if you're returning it with less than a quarter tank left. In my experience, this happens to me roughly one out of every 10 - 15 rentals. If you pick the car up to discover very little gas left, you can call our automated system and report it with just a couple of button pushes, and we'll remind (fine) the previous member that they should've filled the car.
I know I'm jumping in a little late here, but if anyone has any technical questions about the service (I work for Zipcar here in Boston), I'd be happy to take a shot at them.
To answer your question, I (of course) think that the rates are fairly reasonable. Yes, you can rent a car in NJ for $25/day. Then add in the cost of gas for your trip. Next you have to think about insurance, which the rental companies love to confuse you with. It's true that some credit cards will cover some of the liability, but not all, and unless you already own a car you aren't likely to be carrying auto insurance, so add that in too. Also, don't forget the high rental taxes! What you'll find is that that $25 car quickly becomes twice that much, if not more. With Zipcar, that's all included in the rate. Add in the convenience of not having to stand in a rental line, and having the car parked a couple of minutes from you, and I think our service is fairly priced.
I think they could both be in the northern (or southern) hemisphere and still be on opposite sides of the globe. Eg, Russia and Canada or Australia and Argentina.
Given the gigantic expansion of broadband, I'm surprised that cable / dsl modems don't just do NAT and other firewalling techniques by default. It certainly seems like something the industry should push. Sure, today it's spam everyone's worried about, but when WindowsProcessX on port whatever is compromised next Comcast will have to start all over again blocking ports, unless the hardware each user had prevented this. As an added bonus, your "technical" users could configure things to their hearts' content too.
What I like best about this approach is that it lets you define what spam is, instead of having to rely on someone else's (possibly different) definition. For example, I hate receiving urban legend "forward me or die a slow death" emails. These generally pass through my spam filters. If I instead marked these as spam using the process described, before long they would be filtered out too. And, because of the statistical approach, future non-urban-legend emails from said "friend" would not be blocked. Neat.
Have you considered car sharing? It's fairly popular in Europe; in the US, it's small but growing fast. I work for Zipcar, an east coast car sharing (only, we say 'hourly car rental') company. Your version in SF is City Car Share.
While I can't speak for City Car Share, here at Zipcar we park cars in reserved spaces all around the metro area -- right now we're in Boston, DC, and NYC; you reserve online by the hour, and enter/exit the cars with an access card. When you're done, you park the car back in it's home (generally 5 mins. from your home), and the car sends back your milage for us to bill you. It's very painless, and a great alterative to car ownership, especially in cities where that ownership can run into the tens of thousands per year.
There is an important distinction that is alluded to here, and one that I haven't seen talked about much. alienmole says that if someone takes my credit card number and buys a bunch of stuff on the Internet with it, it's the merchant who sold them that stuff that loses. That merchant is out the cost of the goods. Exactly. However, this is only true for merchants that don't have a physical storefront: mailorder places, and -- of course -- Internet shops. For a place such as, say, Best Buy at the mall, as long as Best Buy can prove they compared the signature on the card with the one the customer signed, they're off the hook too. I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that the credit card company is then responsible for this fraud.
So, with credit card companies getting off the hook for Internet purchase fraud, is it any wonder that they're some of the biggest proponants of e-commerce? I've heard that the big Internet merchants take hundreds of losses of sub-hundreds of dollars everyday; money they'll never recover, because it costs too much to track down. Commerce on the Internet isn't safe at all, at least for the merchant. As a consumer though, I'll take my chances.
A vertical breakup, however, would NOT lead to a fracturing of standards. The OSes (NT, 98, CE) would all come from one company which would want standards.
Let the standards come from somewhere larger than a single company. In other words, if things like the API were released into the public domain, then horizontal breakup might not have such the side-effect you suggest. If the API were standardized, then individual "I was once part of MS" companies could implement it to their heart's content, and you would still have enough cross-platform similarities for applications to work correctly across them. The various UNIXes, if I'm not horribly mistaken, work more or less this way. Standards are good, but specific implementation should have lots of competition.
Witholding Ultra information is by no means the most interesting thing the British government did to try and get us out of our isolationist mode and into war. Thomas Mahl wrote an excellent (though fact-packed) book called Desperate Deception, which talks about the hundreds of things the British tried to do to bring us into war. The OSS (precursor to the CIA)? Formed with the help of the British. Female British agents hopping in the sack with Senators. American (bui British-run) polls finding 80% of young men in favor of a draft. Great stuff. I recommend this for any conspiracy junkie out there. (Here's a link to the book.)
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I can figure, around 6.25k/sec is "unlimited" too! Which means I can download this article in a mere 3+ minutes...
Last I checked, Nanosolar's output was entirely spoken for by large utility installations for the next 12 months of production at least. However, their CEO did say this recently:
"Update 4/30: Thank you for the hundreds of comments we have received to this posting via email. Our team has read and digested every single of them. To those of you who are disappointed that our first product is not for residential homeowners, we can reassure you that we do have a fabulous residential solution on our near-term roadmap -- one that will bring the utility scale economics of Nanosolar Utility Panel technology to homes everywhere, and completely redefine how residential solar is done."
So perhaps they'll release a consumer product sooner than I think; let's hope!
I have a catch-all address at my personal domain so I can create one-time addresses for each company I do business with. It's easy to see which addresses leak out that way. Three things I've found:
A surprising number of addresses are taken from private "we will never sell your information" lists (never published anywhere on the interweb). The companies I have contacted about this have always refused to believe that their email lists are involved; perhaps stolen by an ex-employee? I'm not sure.
Second, much of my "spam" (50%?) is actually bounces where my domain was used as the From: header in the email. Luckily this is easy to detect and delete automatically. (Procmail's ^FROM_MAILER contruct is quite nice.)
Third, by now most of the other half of my daily spam is to email addresses at my domain that I have NEVER used -- they're made up. I can only assume that some spammer is indeed trying all the common names at a domain in the hopes of getting through. Luckily procmail and SpamAssassin block all that, but I can guarantee to you that it's happening. If it's not a "dictionary attack", what would you call it?
As I said in a previous post, Zipcar only requires you to be 21, and we're working to lower that age to 18, if you're affiliated with a participating college or univerity. You can find out a bit more on our web site, or check to see if your school has a special deal: http://www.zipcar.com/join/
Disclaimer: I work for Zipcar.
With Zipcar at least, we only require that you've held a driver's license for 3 years (you don't technically need much, if any, driving experience). We're also working on partnerships with colleges and universities to lower the membership age to 18. You're absolutely right, the urban young adult is a great market for us, which is why we're trying our best to sign them up.
Disclaimer: I work for Zipcar.
Actually, we only require you to fill up the car if you're returning it with less than a quarter tank left. In my experience, this happens to me roughly one out of every 10 - 15 rentals. If you pick the car up to discover very little gas left, you can call our automated system and report it with just a couple of button pushes, and we'll remind (fine) the previous member that they should've filled the car.
Disclaimer: I work for Zipcar.
Actually, we're all about the same price when you compare. Zipcar (I can't speak for Flexcar) includes mileage in the rates.
Disclaimer: I work for Zipcar.
I know I'm jumping in a little late here, but if anyone has any technical questions about the service (I work for Zipcar here in Boston), I'd be happy to take a shot at them.
Disclaimer: I work for Zipcar up here in Boston.
To answer your question, I (of course) think that the rates are fairly reasonable. Yes, you can rent a car in NJ for $25/day. Then add in the cost of gas for your trip. Next you have to think about insurance, which the rental companies love to confuse you with. It's true that some credit cards will cover some of the liability, but not all, and unless you already own a car you aren't likely to be carrying auto insurance, so add that in too. Also, don't forget the high rental taxes! What you'll find is that that $25 car quickly becomes twice that much, if not more. With Zipcar, that's all included in the rate. Add in the convenience of not having to stand in a rental line, and having the car parked a couple of minutes from you, and I think our service is fairly priced.
Thanks for reading...
I think they could both be in the northern (or southern) hemisphere and still be on opposite sides of the globe. Eg, Russia and Canada or Australia and Argentina.
Given the gigantic expansion of broadband, I'm surprised that cable / dsl modems don't just do NAT and other firewalling techniques by default. It certainly seems like something the industry should push. Sure, today it's spam everyone's worried about, but when WindowsProcessX on port whatever is compromised next Comcast will have to start all over again blocking ports, unless the hardware each user had prevented this. As an added bonus, your "technical" users could configure things to their hearts' content too.
What I like best about this approach is that it lets you define what spam is, instead of having to rely on someone else's (possibly different) definition. For example, I hate receiving urban legend "forward me or die a slow death" emails. These generally pass through my spam filters. If I instead marked these as spam using the process described, before long they would be filtered out too. And, because of the statistical approach, future non-urban-legend emails from said "friend" would not be blocked. Neat.
While I can't speak for City Car Share, here at Zipcar we park cars in reserved spaces all around the metro area -- right now we're in Boston, DC, and NYC; you reserve online by the hour, and enter/exit the cars with an access card. When you're done, you park the car back in it's home (generally 5 mins. from your home), and the car sends back your milage for us to bill you. It's very painless, and a great alterative to car ownership, especially in cities where that ownership can run into the tens of thousands per year.
So, with credit card companies getting off the hook for Internet purchase fraud, is it any wonder that they're some of the biggest proponants of e-commerce? I've heard that the big Internet merchants take hundreds of losses of sub-hundreds of dollars everyday; money they'll never recover, because it costs too much to track down. Commerce on the Internet isn't safe at all, at least for the merchant. As a consumer though, I'll take my chances.
Let the standards come from somewhere larger than a single company. In other words, if things like the API were released into the public domain, then horizontal breakup might not have such the side-effect you suggest. If the API were standardized, then individual "I was once part of MS" companies could implement it to their heart's content, and you would still have enough cross-platform similarities for applications to work correctly across them. The various UNIXes, if I'm not horribly mistaken, work more or less this way. Standards are good, but specific implementation should have lots of competition.
Witholding Ultra information is by no means the most interesting thing the British government did to try and get us out of our isolationist mode and into war. Thomas Mahl wrote an excellent (though fact-packed) book called Desperate Deception, which talks about the hundreds of things the British tried to do to bring us into war. The OSS (precursor to the CIA)? Formed with the help of the British. Female British agents hopping in the sack with Senators. American (bui British-run) polls finding 80% of young men in favor of a draft. Great stuff. I recommend this for any conspiracy junkie out there. (Here's a link to the book.)