From our experiences in St. Louis (smaller setup, but point-to point T1s and PRI)
SBC has been pretty responsive, really. The problem with CLECs (and none of the responding ones have really mentioned) is that if it is a Bell hardware problem, your wait time won't be decreased a whit. On our PTP lines via SBC, we can typically get a tech onsite/at the pole in about 2 hours. When the PRI goes down, the CLEC spends 4 hours testing it, calls Bell....etc, etc - I've never had it resolved, or even seen a tech in less than 8 hours.
I'm curious about why your PRIs seem to be more reliable - both ride on a T1...so look for the differences there. And when you have an outage, is it dead to the smartjack? (i.e. are you losing the last-mile copper, or is it upstream from there) Try to find CO maps to determine where the circuits run - might you have a bad CO with a leaking roof that 5 lines run through...
I don't have any good answers for you. But look for the common thread in the outages. Demand an explanation each and every time you have an outage - try not to accept 'dunno' as an answer (you'll get a lot of those). If hardware is common with all of your PTP, look hard at that. Our PRI was extremely dodgy for a long time after installation. A newer firmware version card in the switch made a large difference.
Investigate the cost of *HUGE* quantities of flourescent pink tempera paint. You would absolutely *have* to have something water soluble and NON STAINING!
While the Mark sleeps, mix up tempera & paint the cars, trim on the house, roof, Lawn, *EVERYTHING* pink. Leave the sidewalk alone for contrast. I suspect the pink lawn would be horribly frightening all on its own.
Much of this would require access to the home in question.
Needed: 1 Actor/ess the mark doesn't know as the 'Host'
1 Cameraman (needs professional *looking* gear)
1 Sound guy (boom with a dustbunny-looking mike on it)
1 Producer. Optional, but would add to the realism.
1 Designer. Optional, but could be a very fun part for someone to play. Coked out, drunken, wearing thrift store castoffs, whatever.
While the mark is at work/out of town/whatever, do a 'remodel' on the living room. Carefully remove & store all their furniture. Proceed to create the 'Gallery of Ill-Advised DIY'. Watch a lot of the designer shows on HGTV & such for inspiration.
Produce a godawful paint scheme - bonus points for poor application of same. Find the absolute cheapest fire-sale irregular $.12 per yard vinyl sheet flooring you can. Bonus for Avocado or Gold. Put it down before painting, it'll even protect the (real) floor!
Produce a large variety of craft projects (could be done far in advance). I'm thinking of branches from the backyard hot-glued together into a shapeless "Sculpture". Make lamps out of things that shouldn't be - Keyboards, a 7 watt night light that weighs 80 lbs (dead monitor?), that sort of thing.
Find consignment shop furniture that looks as much like theirs as possible. Paint it. Apply glitter. Do whatever nasty things you can think of to 'improve' it. Make them think it's the *original* furniture beneath the burlap-and-pinecone treatment.
When they come home, the camera, sound, and host ambush the mark. Have signs for your imaginary show "Ambush Home Makeover!" or "Dirt Cheap DIY" - have a network 'affiliated' with it - DIY, BBC47, Public access. Think Low, low, low budget. The host actor would have to be good, introducing them to the show & concept, talking about all the work their friend (you) put in to it...before doing the big reveal.
The best part is that you get the reaction on film if you keep them from guessing the truth:) And you can put everything back just like it was with fairly minimal effort - the paint being the biggest issue. But hey, maybe they needed to paint the living room anyway.
Ever see the experiment (Mr Wizard, I think) with hundreds of mousetraps, all with rubber balls on the flippy bit to demonstrate chain reactions?
I've seen Mousetraps 4/$1 at the dollar stores before - with a couple thousand mousetraps, you could rig the building to just go horribly wrong:) You might want to be nice & put safety goggles where they will be entering...
I've been wanting to do this for a looooong time...Still have people giving me stacks of cds from time to time.
The concepts I was working with: 1. Foam disc gun spinning roller concept 2. Yellow (or blue) metallic clicky spring-launched plastic disc concept (late 70's or early '80s gold or blue metallic plastic guns with attached magazine in front of trigger)
Option 2 I suspect would work on a larger scale. Of course, I decided option 1 sounded like more fun. Couldn't get a cordless drill to spin fast enough - could gear it up, but I don't know that it would provide enough torque.
So I used a Circular saw. Got a smooth-edged blade for it (masonry abrasive, IIRC) and rubber-coated the edge of the blade. Didn't have a top roller, just a smooth(ish) top surface. The idea being that the spinning rubber coated sawblade would grab CD & chuck it down barrel.
This was a total failure, of course. Insufficient squishyness in the system meant that the sawblade had too little or too much headspace, and cds would alternately slide through or be flinderized by the blade. And the rubber on the blade lasted about 15 seconds.
Sooooo, I needed more durable ammo around the same caliber. Grabbed a stack of 5.25 HDD platters (doesn't everyone have those?), changed to carbide tipped blade (bite instead of friction), and went to town. Got a few to fly pretty damn well, but WICKED curves on 'em - without spin stablilization, they curve bad.
So, somewhere in my basement are a dozen or so somewhat chewed-up HDD platters, and most likely the CD on which I burned the photos & video.
My suggestion: Go the clicky-spring-gun route - not sure what to use for the spring effect, but it can be done.
I work for a new car dealer...and last week we had a 1926 (may have been 28 - can't remember) Oldsmobile in....we worked on it. And we're not even an Olds dealer. Sounds like your Ford dealer has too much money & doesn't want to risk earning more by serving the customer.
Doesn't matter. It's a well documented movie fact that cars absolutely WILL NOT start at least until the attacker is banging on the window. 30 seconds sounds about right - the only thing that would be missing is 30 seconds of "rowr-rowr-rowr--rowr----rowr-------clickclickclic k 'Come ON! (Thud) rowr-rowrrowrrowrVroom"
Something about the stalker providing percussive maintenance to the vehicle allows it to start in movies...I've wondered how people who *aren't* being stalked drive at all....
Re:Anyone with two feet and perhaps access to a ca
on
The Trouble with RFID
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Okay, when it's in the store, which the company owns, I can only say so much about it.
Moronic criminals? Not as much as you would think. They figured out very quickly that a shopping bag lined with duct tape would foil at least the early RFID readers. Car thieves in my area can break in & steal a car in a tenth the time a skilled mechanic can. Hell, they'll be the *ONLY* ones getting around this.
Long lines at checkout: Okay, throw away some more jobs. While we're at it, I see a pricing discrepancy at least every other time I'm at a grocery store...if you're just shoving a cart through the door, it's pretty hard to tell that you accidentally paid $22.47 for the Black cherry kool-aid (one of 39 packs in your cart).
Privacy is somewhat of an illusion, but that doesn't mean it's not worth TRYING to hang on to little bits here & there.
And think about just how far this can go. Eventually, there could be embedded RFID in every food we eat. As you're driving along, a roadside detector finds that the Big Mac & large fries have moved from the stomach to the small intestine, and changes a billboard ahead of you to advertise Wendy's, while activating a 1/4 watt FM transmitter to transmit ONLY to your car 'Getting hungry, Jim Farnagle? Wendy's is just half a mile ahead on the left! Make it in the next five minutes, get a free apple pie!
The issue is WHERE the line should be drawn. RFID is here to stay, and has some excellent uses. Pallets & tracking inventory - great use of 'em. But once I've purchased a product, the company that made the item, the company that distributed the item, the company that retailed the item, all of their 'business partners', and anyone else can (should) bugger off & mind their own business...go buy a congressman or something.
But at least where I vote, the ballot box is sitting in the middle of the room, where everyone can see it. The voting machines, OTOH, are in curtained booths where someone can stand alone with no observation for 10 minutes or so.
I remember this as well - around '92-93, IIRC. And it was a controversy at the time. I remember our reseller making a point of the differences between manufacturers & capacity.
Pretty good insights there - had to throw two cents in. From a couple sources, Photon torpedoes aren't large, but they require *enormous* amounts of power to arm - far too much for a dinky fighter. Matter/Antimatter torpedoes, basically, and the antimatter has to come from the warp engines on the ship. Of course, Trek is really inconsistent on this. A single Photon torpedo is larger than a very, very large H-bomb, but a 600m ship can take one without shields.
My take - Enterprise = Cruiser Romulan ship = Submarine (can appear and disappear to certain extent, hard to detect) But that analogy breaks down with same weapons used to engage surface/submarine targets......
I work for a small company as the solo-IT guy. We have had a total of 18 Fujitsu drives, all 10GB, from one batch purchase in October, 2000. I've had one failure out of them, and we're at the two year mark, so I certainly haven't seen a fail rate anywhere near whats described. Just another anecdote for the pile...
The United Way has learned that they can reliably get a higher level of donations through the course of a year by working with corporations to do an automatic payroll deduction, versus asking employees to pledge a certain amount.
"Working with corporations" is the most polite term I've heard for what the United Way does...a lot of corporations, going for that 100% goal, subject workers to press-gang charity drives.
I don't like a lot of things the United Way does, but this is one that really gets me....charity is *NEVER* supposed to be mandatory.
"Once again, with 8 percent of precincts reporting, 'The Hot Grits Guy' leads with 84% of the popular vote. 'Al Gore' is in second with 8%. On proposition 'F', the voters want more naked Natalie Portman by a margin of almost 30 to 1. And finally, on the Defense Budget special allocation, proposition 'B', the clear winner is 'All Yuor Base Are Belong to Us'.
Now, in our studio, we have George Will and Steve Ballmer..."
Okay, guys. I'll give you a freebie here. the way to produce a secure format with current technology follows.
First, set a limit on the number of companies licensed to produce players for the new format. Say...about 20. Each month, issue each of these vendors a Triple DES key to put in their software. Then, encrypt copies of each soundfile with *ALL* of the 3DES keys, and place the 20 files in a zip or other container file of some sort. Make the files time-expire by requiring the player programs to contact a master server each time they start up or play a recording. The master server will authenticate the time/date. Any out of date files will be deleted by the player program. If write-protected sound files are detected, have the player lock out the keyboard, and use the (required) modem to dial 911 and report pirate activity.
Unfortunately, there are a few downsides:
Assuming the sound files run about 5MB apiece, the container file should run about 100MB apiece. I'm sure your customers won't mind downloading 100MB per song per month. The players would, of course, have to expire as well.
With your customers paying monthly, your revenue from music sales would rise! (Though some miscreants might refuse to buy into this system, you'd just be losing the pirates anyway, right?)
While some comparisons to DIVX are inevitable, this is a software solution.
The artists would love it! Piracy would drop from 1000% to maybe 5% (cracked keys, but the file will expire anyway). Of course, sales will probably drop to about 5% too, but you'd be saving billions of dollars a year in piracy losses!
There ya' go - a solution. And I won't even charge royalties on the idea. Go get 'em.
Authors note: I seem to have forgotten the {SARCASM} tags...sorry 'bout that
Not trying to flame, and I may be missing something, but the carbon content in fuel must leave the engine somewhere - right now, that's generally as CO2, because CO is bad, Hydrocarbons (smog makers) are bad. Where does the carbon go?
One big problem with Hydro seems to have been overlooked here. It is *extremely* finite. It requires a fairly large volume of water with a very significant drop to produce power effectively. Why do you think the lower Mississippi has never been dammed? While the volume is there, getting a 30+ foot drop in the river would require backing it up into a lake 50 miles or more, flooding untold millions of acres of land (arable land in most cases, too).
The truth is - most rivers that would work for Hydro are already being used. The figures have doubtless changed with newer technologies, but I read ~10-15 years ago that Hydro was effectively 100% saturated in the U.S.
With that said, I think time will take care of the power-generation problem. Solar is making steps toward viability, as is wind (but keep in mind both are geographically sensitive - Quebec is a bad choice for solar) And there are other things on the horizon that might work out (Farnsworth Fusor is interesting).
We have made huge advances in the last 10 years in reducing the damage we're doing - another 20 and I think we'll have a reversal in progress...
Okay - we have the computer of the future here, with 256 GB of *non volatile* RAM. Why on earth would you introduce moving parts to this machine. For god's sake, quadruple the amount of RAM, and forget the spinning disk. How often do HDD's and CD-ROMs fail now as compared to RAM or the CPU (moving parts vs. solid state)? This should boost reliability while greatly reducing power requirements. And it wouldn't have to look like a friggin' frisbee.
Next: While I love the idea of having a desk-sized plasma display, actually making it the desk surface is stupid. Perhaps as an *extra* display, but not for primary. Chiropractors are giggling with glee right now thinking of all the people hunched over, necks bent, waving their arms around at their desk. Ergonomic nightmare.
Third: No keyboard, use voice. Great idea, if you're alone in a soundproof room. Bad idea on a cubicle farm with tens/hundreds of other users. Also would tend to cripple speed on a lot of things. I can type clearly a lot faster than I can speak clearly.
An interesting idea, looking at the computer of 2010, but I think (hope) they missed the mark.
The quick comment: Did someone at MS run this through the sarcasterizer at Brunching or something? A lot of "phrases" are being surrounded by "quotation marks" at odd times. Or is "MS" being run by "Dr. Evil"?
The short version would be:
1) The government is being vague. Really, really vague. How should we know what a "browser" is, anyway? It's just part of our operating system, like IE 5 for "Macintosh" is.... oh.
2) Microsoft shall, for a period of 60^H^H90^H^H120^H^H^Hperpetuity, conduct "business" as usual.
3) Where it shall not "conflict" with item (2), Senior officers and Managers of Microsoft shall fling boogers at "David Boies" on sight.
4) We didn't do "it". Nobody saw us do "it". You can't "prove" anything.
That about sums it up...
p.s. Yes, I feel dirty after reading that whole thing.
Once a patent is received (to be used defensively), come up with a non-expiring license for the product. Then sell that license for, oh...say $1.00. Make the licensing on a *per species* basis, so that the first Homo-sapiens to license it opens it up for the species. Would still need to tackle derivative works somehow, but this would at least allow the center to distribute their work to poorer countries...
Yep - the off-the-shelf availability of the 1GHz is zero. They are being shipped in *extremely* limited quantities to Dell and probably a few others. In fact, Tom's Hardware mentioned that the press in Europe is having an extremely difficult time getting units for testing. Q3 is when they're supposed to ramp up to volume shipments.
Of course, given the still-existing shortage of 800+ MHz parts, I'd take Q3 with a grain of salt...
Slashdot Mirror
From our experiences in St. Louis (smaller setup, but point-to point T1s and PRI)
SBC has been pretty responsive, really. The problem with CLECs (and none of the responding ones have really mentioned) is that if it is a Bell hardware problem, your wait time won't be decreased a whit. On our PTP lines via SBC, we can typically get a tech onsite/at the pole in about 2 hours. When the PRI goes down, the CLEC spends 4 hours testing it, calls Bell....etc, etc - I've never had it resolved, or even seen a tech in less than 8 hours.
I'm curious about why your PRIs seem to be more reliable - both ride on a T1...so look for the differences there. And when you have an outage, is it dead to the smartjack? (i.e. are you losing the last-mile copper, or is it upstream from there) Try to find CO maps to determine where the circuits run - might you have a bad CO with a leaking roof that 5 lines run through...
I don't have any good answers for you. But look for the common thread in the outages. Demand an explanation each and every time you have an outage - try not to accept 'dunno' as an answer (you'll get a lot of those). If hardware is common with all of your PTP, look hard at that. Our PRI was extremely dodgy for a long time after installation. A newer firmware version card in the switch made a large difference.
Good luck...
Investigate the cost of *HUGE* quantities of flourescent pink tempera paint. You would absolutely *have* to have something water soluble and NON STAINING!
While the Mark sleeps, mix up tempera & paint the cars, trim on the house, roof, Lawn, *EVERYTHING* pink. Leave the sidewalk alone for contrast. I suspect the pink lawn would be horribly frightening all on its own.
Much of this would require access to the home in question.
:) And you can put everything back just like it was with fairly minimal effort - the paint being the biggest issue. But hey, maybe they needed to paint the living room anyway.
Needed: 1 Actor/ess the mark doesn't know as the 'Host'
1 Cameraman (needs professional *looking* gear)
1 Sound guy (boom with a dustbunny-looking mike on it)
1 Producer. Optional, but would add to the realism.
1 Designer. Optional, but could be a very fun part for someone to play. Coked out, drunken, wearing thrift store castoffs, whatever.
While the mark is at work/out of town/whatever, do a 'remodel' on the living room. Carefully remove & store all their furniture. Proceed to create the 'Gallery of Ill-Advised DIY'. Watch a lot of the designer shows on HGTV & such for inspiration.
Produce a godawful paint scheme - bonus points for poor application of same. Find the absolute cheapest fire-sale irregular $.12 per yard vinyl sheet flooring you can. Bonus for Avocado or Gold. Put it down before painting, it'll even protect the (real) floor!
Produce a large variety of craft projects (could be done far in advance). I'm thinking of branches from the backyard hot-glued together into a shapeless "Sculpture". Make lamps out of things that shouldn't be - Keyboards, a 7 watt night light that weighs 80 lbs (dead monitor?), that sort of thing.
Find consignment shop furniture that looks as much like theirs as possible. Paint it. Apply glitter. Do whatever nasty things you can think of to 'improve' it. Make them think it's the *original* furniture beneath the burlap-and-pinecone treatment.
When they come home, the camera, sound, and host ambush the mark. Have signs for your imaginary show "Ambush Home Makeover!" or "Dirt Cheap DIY" - have a network 'affiliated' with it - DIY, BBC47, Public access. Think Low, low, low budget. The host actor would have to be good, introducing them to the show & concept, talking about all the work their friend (you) put in to it...before doing the big reveal.
The best part is that you get the reaction on film if you keep them from guessing the truth
Ever see the experiment (Mr Wizard, I think) with hundreds of mousetraps, all with rubber balls on the flippy bit to demonstrate chain reactions?
:) You might want to be nice & put safety goggles where they will be entering...
I've seen Mousetraps 4/$1 at the dollar stores before - with a couple thousand mousetraps, you could rig the building to just go horribly wrong
I've been wanting to do this for a looooong time...Still have people giving me stacks of cds from time to time.
The concepts I was working with:
1. Foam disc gun spinning roller concept
2. Yellow (or blue) metallic clicky spring-launched plastic disc concept (late 70's or early '80s gold or blue metallic plastic guns with attached magazine in front of trigger)
Option 2 I suspect would work on a larger scale. Of course, I decided option 1 sounded like more fun. Couldn't get a cordless drill to spin fast enough - could gear it up, but I don't know that it would provide enough torque.
So I used a Circular saw. Got a smooth-edged blade for it (masonry abrasive, IIRC) and rubber-coated the edge of the blade. Didn't have a top roller, just a smooth(ish) top surface. The idea being that the spinning rubber coated sawblade would grab CD & chuck it down barrel.
This was a total failure, of course. Insufficient squishyness in the system meant that the sawblade had too little or too much headspace, and cds would alternately slide through or be flinderized by the blade. And the rubber on the blade lasted about 15 seconds.
Sooooo, I needed more durable ammo around the same caliber. Grabbed a stack of 5.25 HDD platters (doesn't everyone have those?), changed to carbide tipped blade (bite instead of friction), and went to town. Got a few to fly pretty damn well, but WICKED curves on 'em - without spin stablilization, they curve bad.
So, somewhere in my basement are a dozen or so somewhat chewed-up HDD platters, and most likely the CD on which I burned the photos & video.
My suggestion: Go the clicky-spring-gun route - not sure what to use for the spring effect, but it can be done.
I work for a new car dealer...and last week we had a 1926 (may have been 28 - can't remember) Oldsmobile in....we worked on it. And we're not even an Olds dealer. Sounds like your Ford dealer has too much money & doesn't want to risk earning more by serving the customer.
Doesn't matter. It's a well documented movie fact that cars absolutely WILL NOT start at least until the attacker is banging on the window. 30 seconds sounds about right - the only thing that would be missing is 30 seconds of "rowr-rowr-rowr--rowr----rowr-------clickclickclic k 'Come ON! (Thud) rowr-rowrrowrrowrVroom"
Something about the stalker providing percussive maintenance to the vehicle allows it to start in movies...I've wondered how people who *aren't* being stalked drive at all....
Okay, when it's in the store, which the company owns, I can only say so much about it.
Moronic criminals? Not as much as you would think. They figured out very quickly that a shopping bag lined with duct tape would foil at least the early RFID readers. Car thieves in my area can break in & steal a car in a tenth the time a skilled mechanic can. Hell, they'll be the *ONLY* ones getting around this.
Long lines at checkout: Okay, throw away some more jobs. While we're at it, I see a pricing discrepancy at least every other time I'm at a grocery store...if you're just shoving a cart through the door, it's pretty hard to tell that you accidentally paid $22.47 for the Black cherry kool-aid (one of 39 packs in your cart).
Privacy is somewhat of an illusion, but that doesn't mean it's not worth TRYING to hang on to little bits here & there.
And think about just how far this can go. Eventually, there could be embedded RFID in every food we eat. As you're driving along, a roadside detector finds that the Big Mac & large fries have moved from the stomach to the small intestine, and changes a billboard ahead of you to advertise Wendy's, while activating a 1/4 watt FM transmitter to transmit ONLY to your car 'Getting hungry, Jim Farnagle? Wendy's is just half a mile ahead on the left! Make it in the next five minutes, get a free apple pie!
The issue is WHERE the line should be drawn. RFID is here to stay, and has some excellent uses. Pallets & tracking inventory - great use of 'em. But once I've purchased a product, the company that made the item, the company that distributed the item, the company that retailed the item, all of their 'business partners', and anyone else can (should) bugger off & mind their own business...go buy a congressman or something.
But at least where I vote, the ballot box is sitting in the middle of the room, where everyone can see it. The voting machines, OTOH, are in curtained booths where someone can stand alone with no observation for 10 minutes or so.
Well, here: http://cellphoneshop.net/baforno63.html
:)
Just an example...depending on model, cell batts for $6+
Notebooks, of course, are another matter
I remember this as well - around '92-93, IIRC. And it was a controversy at the time. I remember our reseller making a point of the differences between manufacturers & capacity.
Webcast underway - another mirror:
http://biz.yahoo.com/cc/0/30510.html
God, I'm a dork....
Pretty good insights there - had to throw two cents in. From a couple sources, Photon torpedoes aren't large, but they require *enormous* amounts of power to arm - far too much for a dinky fighter. Matter/Antimatter torpedoes, basically, and the antimatter has to come from the warp engines on the ship. Of course, Trek is really inconsistent on this. A single Photon torpedo is larger than a very, very large H-bomb, but a 600m ship can take one without shields.
My take - Enterprise = Cruiser Romulan ship = Submarine (can appear and disappear to certain extent, hard to detect) But that analogy breaks down with same weapons used to engage surface/submarine targets......
I work for a small company as the solo-IT guy. We have had a total of 18 Fujitsu drives, all 10GB, from one batch purchase in October, 2000. I've had one failure out of them, and we're at the two year mark, so I certainly haven't seen a fail rate anywhere near whats described. Just another anecdote for the pile...
This looks like a Segway-inspired version of a Dalek.....
I'm sorry, but that's what it looks like to me - as soon as I saw the thing, I just kept hearing
"EXTERMINATE ------- EXTERMINATE"
Then again, that's probably just the cold medication.
The United Way has learned that they can reliably get a higher level of donations through the course of a year by working with corporations to do an automatic payroll deduction, versus asking employees to pledge a certain amount.
"Working with corporations" is the most polite term I've heard for what the United Way does...a lot of corporations, going for that 100% goal, subject workers to press-gang charity drives.
I don't like a lot of things the United Way does, but this is one that really gets me....charity is *NEVER* supposed to be mandatory.
"Once again, with 8 percent of precincts reporting, 'The Hot Grits Guy' leads with 84% of the popular vote. 'Al Gore' is in second with 8%. On proposition 'F', the voters want more naked Natalie Portman by a margin of almost 30 to 1. And finally, on the Defense Budget special allocation, proposition 'B', the clear winner is 'All Yuor Base Are Belong to Us'.
Now, in our studio, we have George Will and Steve Ballmer..."
I'm sorry...I just couldn't resist.
First, set a limit on the number of companies licensed to produce players for the new format. Say...about 20. Each month, issue each of these vendors a Triple DES key to put in their software. Then, encrypt copies of each soundfile with *ALL* of the 3DES keys, and place the 20 files in a zip or other container file of some sort. Make the files time-expire by requiring the player programs to contact a master server each time they start up or play a recording. The master server will authenticate the time/date. Any out of date files will be deleted by the player program. If write-protected sound files are detected, have the player lock out the keyboard, and use the (required) modem to dial 911 and report pirate activity.
Unfortunately, there are a few downsides:
With your customers paying monthly, your revenue from music sales would rise! (Though some miscreants might refuse to buy into this system, you'd just be losing the pirates anyway, right?)
While some comparisons to DIVX are inevitable, this is a software solution.
The artists would love it! Piracy would drop from 1000% to maybe 5% (cracked keys, but the file will expire anyway). Of course, sales will probably drop to about 5% too, but you'd be saving billions of dollars a year in piracy losses!
There ya' go - a solution. And I won't even charge royalties on the idea. Go get 'em.
Authors note: I seem to have forgotten the {SARCASM} tags...sorry 'bout that
Not trying to flame, and I may be missing something, but the carbon content in fuel must leave the engine somewhere - right now, that's generally as CO2, because CO is bad, Hydrocarbons (smog makers) are bad. Where does the carbon go?
.
One big problem with Hydro seems to have been overlooked here. It is *extremely* finite. It requires a fairly large volume of water with a very significant drop to produce power effectively. Why do you think the lower Mississippi has never been dammed? While the volume is there, getting a 30+ foot drop in the river would require backing it up into a lake 50 miles or more, flooding untold millions of acres of land (arable land in most cases, too).
The truth is - most rivers that would work for Hydro are already being used. The figures have doubtless changed with newer technologies, but I read ~10-15 years ago that Hydro was effectively 100% saturated in the U.S.
With that said, I think time will take care of the power-generation problem. Solar is making steps toward viability, as is wind (but keep in mind both are geographically sensitive - Quebec is a bad choice for solar) And there are other things on the horizon that might work out (Farnsworth Fusor is interesting).
We have made huge advances in the last 10 years in reducing the damage we're doing - another 20 and I think we'll have a reversal in progress...
Okay - we have the computer of the future here, with 256 GB of *non volatile* RAM. Why on earth would you introduce moving parts to this machine. For god's sake, quadruple the amount of RAM, and forget the spinning disk. How often do HDD's and CD-ROMs fail now as compared to RAM or the CPU (moving parts vs. solid state)? This should boost reliability while greatly reducing power requirements. And it wouldn't have to look like a friggin' frisbee.
Next: While I love the idea of having a desk-sized plasma display, actually making it the desk surface is stupid. Perhaps as an *extra* display, but not for primary. Chiropractors are giggling with glee right now thinking of all the people hunched over, necks bent, waving their arms around at their desk. Ergonomic nightmare.
Third: No keyboard, use voice. Great idea, if you're alone in a soundproof room. Bad idea on a cubicle farm with tens/hundreds of other users. Also would tend to cripple speed on a lot of things. I can type clearly a lot faster than I can speak clearly.
An interesting idea, looking at the computer of 2010, but I think (hope) they missed the mark.
The quick comment: Did someone at MS run this through the sarcasterizer at Brunching or something? A lot of "phrases" are being surrounded by "quotation marks" at odd times. Or is "MS" being run by "Dr. Evil"?
The short version would be:
1) The government is being vague. Really, really vague. How should we know what a "browser" is, anyway? It's just part of our operating system, like IE 5 for "Macintosh" is.... oh.
2) Microsoft shall, for a period of 60^H^H90^H^H120^H^H^Hperpetuity, conduct "business" as usual.
3) Where it shall not "conflict" with item (2), Senior officers and Managers of Microsoft shall fling boogers at "David Boies" on sight.
4) We didn't do "it". Nobody saw us do "it". You can't "prove" anything.
That about sums it up...
p.s. Yes, I feel dirty after reading that whole thing.
Almost complete mirror - a couple images I can't get to come down at all...
Case Project Mirror
Once a patent is received (to be used defensively), come up with a non-expiring license for the product. Then sell that license for, oh...say $1.00. Make the licensing on a *per species* basis, so that the first Homo-sapiens to license it opens it up for the species. Would still need to tackle derivative works somehow, but this would at least allow the center to distribute their work to poorer countries...
Yep - the off-the-shelf availability of the 1GHz is zero. They are being shipped in *extremely* limited quantities to Dell and probably a few others. In fact, Tom's Hardware mentioned that the press in Europe is having an extremely difficult time getting units for testing. Q3 is when they're supposed to ramp up to volume shipments.
Of course, given the still-existing shortage of 800+ MHz parts, I'd take Q3 with a grain of salt...