Civ owned my life for about 4 years or so. I remember, back in middle school and high school, running between classes to get to a library computer before they were all taken up by other addicts just so I could get in 2 minutes of play time before I had to run to class. All of my friends and I had long talks about strategy and I even dreamed about my empire at night. After years of playing, I finally realized my addiction and was able to move on. I got ahold of a copy of the original Civ 6 months ago but I refuse to load it up because I'm afraid it still might have some power over me.
There's another possibility these people may want to consider. Move to Northern California and push for a division of the state. It's not particularly likely to happen but:
1. NorCal has a pretty strong identity. A lot of people there don't identify at all with SoCal folks. And there's a history of a separationist movement (in terms of the state being split) in NorCal from the ecotopia-ists to those in favor of gaining better control of water.
2. NorCal has a fairly strong libertarian base already.
3. A lot of geeks already live in NorCal (ie. Silicon Valley). Although, most people who live in the northern regions of NorCal don't lay claim to Silicon Valley.
4. There's actually an economy in NorCal.
The biggest downside to this idea is that a lot of people in NorCal are dependent on federal subsidies (farmers and loggers) but probably not as much as those in the midwest (NorCal has more crop diversity and many of those crops are not covered by farm subsidies).
Furethermore I believe multiple small fans would be more efficient. Now, IANAAE (I am not an aeronautical engineer) but the total airflow through a large fan's housing is much greater than the amount of airflow that actually pushes the fan (obvious). Many small fans could fill that area more completely and harvest more of the total airflow.
Remember, though, that these are mechanical systems. Using lots of small fans may result in more energy lost to friction and transmission costs than the amount of energy lost if you used 1 large fan. Most likely, engineers will need to calculate the optimum size of the fans to use based on their generator efficiency versus their space efficiency.
One solution may be to use 1 large fan with 4 smaller fans set in each corner of the frame. That would combine the generator efficiency of 1 large fan with the space efficiency of smaller fans.
The threading system used under WinNT is not fully preemptive. Processes/Threads may prevent the operating system from giving control to another process by changing their priority. This reallocates their time quantum. Do it often enough and a program can effectively lock the system up. Here's the quote from www.sysinternals.com/tips.htm
In NT, as with most
time-sharing operating systems, threads run in turns called quantums. Normally,
a thread executes until its quantum runs out. The next time it is scheduled it
starts with a full quantum. However, in NT a thread also gets its quantum
refreshed every time its thread or process priority is set. This means that a
thread can reset its quantum by calling SetThreadPriority (without
changing its priority) before its turn runs out. If it continues to do this it
will effectively have an infinite quantum. Why does NT do this? Its not clear,
but it appears to be a bug.
As distasteful as the thought may sound to some of us, it may be time to solicit the help of the government. Specifically, I believe it was California's governor, Gray Davis, who was recently talking about building a virtual library of all the texts in the California State university system. In this case, collaboration may make sense.
When I was in high school (not a pleasant experience for me, either), my friends and I did research on the topic of students rights and went so far as to contact a lawyer specializing in constitutional law. Our focus was whether or not we had the right to have our opinions printed as editorials in the school newspaper when they contradicted those expressed in a pro-Cheerleading editorial. If we didn't have the right to publish our viable arguments to the contrary, we wanted to find out if we had the right to start up our own competing newspaper. The short answer to both of our questions was no.
All of our research into this subject has shown that, since the Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School Disctric case in 1969, subsequent court cases have stripped students of many of their rights. Our evidence showed that high school students do, essentially, leave their most rights at the gate when they walk onto school grounds. Most student rights were stripped from them in the attempt to "protect" students from the harsh realities of the real world.
Ironically, these measures created a place who's reality is much harsher than all but the worst places on Earth.
If someone actually did buy the source code to Windows, would they actually be able to use it? How many companies are going to invest the time and effort needed to read through 35 million plus lines of spaghetti code? Forcing Microsoft to release their source code will not do the industry any good. At most, we will all get a good laugh at the horrendous coding practices and colleges will be able to show students an example of what not to do.
Forcing Microsoft to release their standards and protocols is the fairest and most logical way to settle the case.
Slashdot Mirror
Civ owned my life for about 4 years or so. I remember, back in middle school and high school, running between classes to get to a library computer before they were all taken up by other addicts just so I could get in 2 minutes of play time before I had to run to class. All of my friends and I had long talks about strategy and I even dreamed about my empire at night. After years of playing, I finally realized my addiction and was able to move on. I got ahold of a copy of the original Civ 6 months ago but I refuse to load it up because I'm afraid it still might have some power over me.
Garrett
There's another possibility these people may want to consider. Move to Northern California and push for a division of the state. It's not particularly likely to happen but:
1. NorCal has a pretty strong identity. A lot of people there don't identify at all with SoCal folks. And there's a history of a separationist movement (in terms of the state being split) in NorCal from the ecotopia-ists to those in favor of gaining better control of water.
2. NorCal has a fairly strong libertarian base already.
3. A lot of geeks already live in NorCal (ie. Silicon Valley). Although, most people who live in the northern regions of NorCal don't lay claim to Silicon Valley.
4. There's actually an economy in NorCal.
The biggest downside to this idea is that a lot of people in NorCal are dependent on federal subsidies (farmers and loggers) but probably not as much as those in the midwest (NorCal has more crop diversity and many of those crops are not covered by farm subsidies).
Garrett
Furethermore I believe multiple small fans would be more efficient. Now, IANAAE (I am not an aeronautical engineer) but the total airflow through a large fan's housing is much greater than the amount of airflow that actually pushes the fan (obvious). Many small fans could fill that area more completely and harvest more of the total airflow.
Remember, though, that these are mechanical systems. Using lots of small fans may result in more energy lost to friction and transmission costs than the amount of energy lost if you used 1 large fan. Most likely, engineers will need to calculate the optimum size of the fans to use based on their generator efficiency versus their space efficiency.
One solution may be to use 1 large fan with 4 smaller fans set in each corner of the frame. That would combine the generator efficiency of 1 large fan with the space efficiency of smaller fans.
Hmmm...any ideas on how this could be abused?
As distasteful as the thought may sound to some of us, it may be time to solicit the help of the government. Specifically, I believe it was California's governor, Gray Davis, who was recently talking about building a virtual library of all the texts in the California State university system. In this case, collaboration may make sense.
When I was in high school (not a pleasant experience for me, either), my friends and I did research on the topic of students rights and went so far as to contact a lawyer specializing in constitutional law. Our focus was whether or not we had the right to have our opinions printed as editorials in the school newspaper when they contradicted those expressed in a pro-Cheerleading editorial. If we didn't have the right to publish our viable arguments to the contrary, we wanted to find out if we had the right to start up our own competing newspaper. The short answer to both of our questions was no.
All of our research into this subject has shown that, since the Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School Disctric case in 1969, subsequent court cases have stripped students of many of their rights. Our evidence showed that high school students do, essentially, leave their most rights at the gate when they walk onto school grounds. Most student rights were stripped from them in the attempt to "protect" students from the harsh realities of the real world.
Ironically, these measures created a place who's reality is much harsher than all but the worst places on Earth.
If someone actually did buy the source code to Windows, would they actually be able to use it? How many companies are going to invest the time and effort needed to read through 35 million plus lines of spaghetti code? Forcing Microsoft to release their source code will not do the industry any good. At most, we will all get a good laugh at the horrendous coding practices and colleges will be able to show students an example of what not to do.
Forcing Microsoft to release their standards and protocols is the fairest and most logical way to settle the case.